Again with the Whitsundays

At Blue Pearl Bay we spied the sun and courted the voracious batfish with their favoured meal of delicately flavoured arborio rice. At last, the Whitsundays were beginning to show us their true colours and some snorkelling was likely in the upcoming days with the water clearing after the turbulence of the recent winds. All was well. Which is when a gentle wind change, much like that early in Pirates of the Carribean, wafted across the bay and heralded trouble brewing in the air. Months on the sea had tuned the senses of the Captain to these subtle shifts in the atmosphere and sure enough, on the falling of dusk, a no good pirate ship drifted into Blue Pearl Bay and secured itself to another mooring buoy. There was something unusual about this boat indeed: it came with the lines of a clipper but with a fully enclosed transparent marquee erected on the deck. The immediate blaring of some sort of Ibiza house music mix heralded its intentions and these intentions were unmistakable: a backpacker's dance party until the wee hours of the morning.

`The sun departs for the Winter Solstice at Stonehaven