Earlier in the week we'd booked to do a whale watching cruise today hoping that the wind would have abated and that turned out to be so. It was an easy 15 minute walk from the Pier Caravan Park to the Boat Club at the Marina, where our cruise would leave from at 1:30pm. The MV Amaroo operated by the Boat Club can carry around 70 passengers, but there were less than 20 on today's cruise, making it easy for everyone to have a good view of the action. 

The species here are Pacific Humpback whales which pause here to rest, feed and train the calves in preparation for their migration South to the Antarctic for their Summer feeding season after the females calved further North up the Queensland coast. Their stay in this area averages 8 days. The boat's Master told us that it would take us around an hour to reach the whale watching area in Platypus Bay, located on the north western side of Fraser Island. But well short of the hour mark we were fortunate to come across a pod of five whales - a mother and her calf and three male escorts. 

 

It was pretty amazing to see these very large animals some distance off the boat, but with the boat motor turned off and the boat drifting, we got an even closer look when some of them came close to the boat, sometimes swimming under it before resurfacing on the other side. See one move majestically here. They say the bright colours of the Amaroo and human physical movement/noise on the boat attracts interest from the whales. Among the passengers on board we had an elderly gentleman who did a great job doing that, entertaining us all.

 

Once the activity of this pod stopped the boat moved to another area within the Bay where another pod was active. And this was repeated a couple of times. During the afternoon we saw more than a dozen whales, all of which seemed quite happy to show us their water gymnastics.

The Sun was setting as the boat returned to the Marina and it was dark by the time we'd walked back to the caravan park, after what was a great day of whale watching. Interestingly we saw a number bats flying overhead as we approached the caravan park.

The fridge is looking a bit empty and so we'll need to restock when we move onto Caloundra  tomorrow, but the Woolworths soups we had for dinner hit the mark. We had a bonus to go with a banana for dessert. Last night we found a box of four Vanilla & Almond with Himalayan Salted Chocolate ice creams on a stick left in the camp kitchen freezer with a note "Free to a good home - we can't take them with us as we don't have a freezer in our van". Thank you to whoever left them!