After the amazing diving experience we thought we had enough. We could have added an extra day to the dive course to get our Advanced Open Water certificate, but choose not to do that and just relax the last day in Port Douglas before going home. Well… that was the plan… As the Australian football team was playing the Thursday evening, what made it our Friday early morning at 0500 and we got up to watch them qualify for the next round, we were wide awake at 0700 and wondered what to do with the day.

The Low Isles had been mentioned before, because one of Sally’s friends (I think it was Robyn, the girl wonder) had recommended that place to us. So after a very short debate and a concluding “yeah, why not!” we booked a spot on a catamaran at 10 to take us to the Low Isles! And even though it might not have been planned, it still turned out to be quite a relax day.

The boat ride to the Low Isles was just a short one (about 45 minutes or so?) and the Low Isles appeared to be 2 small islands. One with mainly mangrove and the other a cute little one with a little lighthouse. As proper tourist-cattle we followed the big herd to the island which looked a lot different when covered with people in full blue body suits (to protect them from the sun, coral and hungry fishies).

Low Isles smurf

We brought our snorkelling gear and were excited to give it a go, as we were told there should be a lot of sea turtles around the Low Isles! And the stories were right!! We had to swim quite a bit out from the shore, but all of a sudden Sally spotted something weird in the water! A closer look proved it to be what we were looking and hoping for! A big turtle!!! Truly amazing experience! Ok… we were not allowed to swim with the turtles, follow them or get close… but I had to do all those things to get the following (fuzzy) picture:

Beautiful turtle!

But one little bit scared turtle was worth it! :-) Especially I looked like a big fishy myself underwater with my big eyes which looked even bigger through the mask! After seeing 2 more turtles we were getting cold and made our way back to shore, relaxed a bit more in the sun and took the boat back to Port Douglas in the afternoon. Because of the crowded beach and water the snorkelling wasn’t the best (again fuzzy water like in the busy section on Green Island) but definitely worth the trip! :-)

Low Isles	Lighthouse	Lighthouse again	Gorgeous view

This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 10:53 and is filed under Diving, Australia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.