This morning we took the ferry from Yeppoon to Great Keppel Island, which would be our home for the next 5 days. Unfortunately, it was raining, which made us worry about how the weather would be for our 2 days of sea kayaking and then 3 days of scuba diving. There is a cyclone out in the ocean that has looked potentially threatening. While it has turned aways from us, there is still the possibility of disrupted weather due to the cyclone. Nevertheless, we were headed to Keppel Island on the south end of the Great Barrier Reef, so we had to make the most of it regardless of the weather.
After the 30 minute ferry, we walked to our accommodation called the Roundhouse, which was a great place as you can see in the following picture. The house had 4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, a kitchen, dining room, and a living room. We had it all to ourselves. There were birds and lizards all over the place (see second picture).
After a swim and some lunch, we walked down to the dive shop with our gear to get started on our sea kayaking mini-expedition. Basically we were kayaking to another island called Hump Island where we would stay for 2 nights and then kayak back to Keppel Island on the following morning. At the dive shop, we met our guide named Scott. We had a quick paddle and then headed out toward Humpy Island in our double kayaks. The weather ended up being great with the sun shining. We made it to Humpy Island in an hour and a half or so. It was a nice easy paddle with some fun bumpy spots. We saw some big sea turtles and a ton of jellyfish.
When we landed on the beach, we moved the boats and set up camp. We were unbelievably fortunate to have the entire island to ourselves since it had been shut down due to the impending cyclone (that didn't come, heh). Thus, we had a 60 person campsite to ourselves with bathrooms, footwashes, and showers. Pretty sweet.
The next day we took a walk around Humpy Island. It was really beautiful. Take a look at the pictures.
This rock tower is called a cairn.
I really enjoyed the walk, and I actually did it a second time since I didn't have a camera the first time around. After lunch we kayaked for about 2 hours. We paddled to another part of Great Keppel Island and checked out a couple caves. We had to surf our kayaks on some decent sized waves to get to the beach where the caves were. Most people tipped, but it was fun. I found out later that the caves had been used a long time ago to lock Aborigines causing them to die when the tide came in, which is pretty disturbing. After the caves we paddled back to Humpy Island and just relaxed or played cards for the rest of the evening.
We kayaked back to the dive shop at Great Keppel Island early the next morning. After cleaning up the boats, we went back to the house for breakfast. Then Andy, Philip, and I went back to the dive shop to get started on our open water dives for our scuba certification with Adam. It's awesome that we are getting our certification on the Great Barrier Reef. Today we did 2 dives. The first was at the Big Peninsula, and the second was at the Underwater Observatory, which was closed preventing us from seeing people looking at us underwater. Both were great dives. There were a ton of pretty fish and coral; unfortunately I don't really know many names. We were also able to see a sunken ship on the Underwater Observatory dive. I spent the rest of the day taking my exams for the scuba book work and then just hanging out.
The next day was similar. In the morning we did another certification dive. We went back to the Big Peninsula. It was the same site as yesterday, but fortunately we did a different segment making it feel like a completely different dive. The visibility was awesome, and I saw 2 bull rays, which were definitely the coolest things I've seen so far. They were huge rays that were blue in color and almost circular. They seemed otherworldly and reminded me of something out of The Matrix as they hovered in the water and moved from location to location.
After the dive I finished my Secret Kiwi gift and did my scuba final exam. Later I went snorkeling with Philip out at the beach. It was low tide and thus really shallow with poor visibility. There were tons of sea cucumbers on the ground, and it was extremely eerie since you could only see a few feet away. Once Philip saw a wobegon shark on the floor between us, we were spooked and got out of there.
That night we exchanged our Secret Kiwi gifts. Everyone had nice gifts, but I especially liked what Andy gave to Philip. It was a coconut that had a face carved out of it. It was really good, especially since he did it this afternoon.
On our last full day in Keppel, we did two more dives. The first was at a site called Man and Wife Rock, which was a nice dive. We only actually had to complete 4 open water dives to get or PADI scuba certification, but we decided to do another dive for fun. This Half Rocks site was supposed to have a good amount of sea snakes, which have an incredibly lethal bite but apparently are nothing to worry about since they pretty much never do bite. We only saw one, which is fine with me since I'm a little scared of snakes.
After lunch I went for a walk around the island. It was about a 2 hour walk up to Mt. Wyndam and back, and there were many great views. Check out the photos.
Yes, camels (probably not indigenous).
For our last night on Keppel, the entire group went out to the beach at sunset for some champagne. The sunset was spectacular.
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