Cairns Day Six - Fitzroy Island

We spent the whole day on Fiztroy Island.  It is a National Park, and not really big on the tourist trail, maybe just over 100 people go there a day - only about 30 got off the boat we took over to the island.  There is a small resort and a small camping ground and a turtle rehabilitation centre.  It is a continental island, meaning thousands of years ago it was connected to the mainland, hence the boulders I guess.  It also has a fringing coral reef which lies within the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area.  The Great Barrier Reef is the largest single living organism in the world.

This place is pristine, mostly coastal type rainforest. There are a few tracks that get rougher as you go along.  This is a photo of the first boulders in the easy bit as we walked to Nudey Beach (many visitors don't bother! And yes, it once was a nude beach but it isn't now).  It became more er, boulder-ish as we went along and we had to clamber. 

The start of the boulders, this is the easy bit at the start

That's the mainland over there

The Coral Sea

The track winds through coastal rainforest and out onto the coast

I think I see a beach

Above Nudey Beach

Boulders

We couldn't wait to get down there

The beach here is coral and sand

Nudey Beach - I love the colour of the water

The water was really cold

How beautiful is that?

On the way back we saw a tall ship sailing

This is the jetty at Welcome Bay.  The reef is very close to the shore here

We had some lunch and later we took a glass bottom boat round to Shark Fin Bay where there is some very impressive coral.  You can't take photos that work out in a glass bottom boat so I just took photos of the shoreline as we went round.

Leaving Welcome Bay

Turtle Rehab Centre can just be seen

Cool boulders

Shark Fin Bay

Shark Fin Bay

There was some really large coral here of all different varieties.  Plus we saw Nemo, and a green sea turtle.

My boulders

In the centre is the rock formation that looks like a shark fin, hence the name of the bay

I really liked these boulders in the water

Later I did some snorkeling at Welcome Bay, but it wasn't very successful for me.  The water was a lot warmer than Nudey Beach but the reef is very close to the surface and I kept thinking I was going to run into things, like huge coral for example.  Plus my snorkel clip kept falling off my mask, my mask was foggy and I got coral in one of my flippers when I first put them on, and dented my shins on the coral seabed doing the same.  It was kind of problematic.   I also cut my thumb - coral cuts can get infected easily so I had to get antiseptic onto it.  I also felt sunburned, so I gave up pretty quickly and we went to Foxy's Bar for a beer to wait for the boat to take us back to Cairns (Foxy's Bar serves the resort, campers and day visitors but don't get me wrong, it just has a roof and tables, although the beer is cold and they serve food too).  It had a rustic atmosphere.

View from Foxy's Bar

On the boat on the way back we met a really cool guy and his daughter from Iowa.  They had been on the trip of a lifetime, in their words.  All over the North Island of New Zealand and the east coast of Australia.  She was in her 20's I guess and I'd seen her snorkeling like all day.  Much more successful with the snorkeling than me.  Unbelievably they were flying home the next morning starting at 3:00am.  The itinerary (yes, starting at 3:00am) was Cairns - Brisbane - Los Angeles - Dallas - Des Moines - and then a drive to their home town (sadly, the name of that town I can't recall).  That's one big trip.  We wished them a safe, if tiring,  trip home.  They were cool people.