Joel & Nicola's Travelling Adventure: Whitehaven Beach

We took off from the Blizzard in a little dinghy, five of us and Dave, towards Whitsunday Island where the famous and picturesque Whitehaven Beach lay. After jumping off on shore, we waited whilst Dave collected the remaining five passengers. Dave had told us that Whitehaven Beach was the purest silica beach in the world, with a silica content at 98% - impressive especially considering Lake Mackenzie on Fraser Island (see previous blog post) had a silica count around 70% and was the whitest and purest shore I had seen so far.

We made the short trek overland to Whitehaven Beach and were met with a view of the most beautiful beach we ever laid eyes, so beautiful in fact that we fear no beach will ever come close to the white, heavenly soft silica on Whitehaven. I say silica as opposed to sand, because there still leaves room to discover the best sand beach in the world, as technically, Whitehaven Beach is a silica beach.

We trotted towards the sea and set our bags around 50 metres from the water where we had a chance to put on our stinger suits – basically wetsuits. It was jellyfish season and as mentioned before, there were poisonous box jellyfish and the even more deadly irukandji jellyfish in the waters so the suits were designed to prevent a fatal sting. Your hands, feet and head are uncovered, and the idea is that if you are stung on your hands or feet by the time the poison gets to your heart and is pumped around your body its effects have lessened so you’d only spend a day in hospital as opposed to two weeks/death if you were stung across the chest. As for if you were stung on your head, we were not informed and did not want to know…but we assumed it meant a long spell in hospital if not death. Getting stung by an irukandji produces what is known as irukandji syndrome, you start to get severe headaches, lose control of your bowels and your immune system is severely compromised. Not nice.

On a lighter note we stinger suited-up and headed into the water, which was cool and refreshing. The sun was particularly hot and due to the glare from the beach made us at a higher risk of burning than normal, plus being in a wetsuit didn’t particularly help keep us cool either. It is hard to put into words how beautiful Whitehaven Beach was, the pictures may do it some justice, but until you visit yourself only then will you have an understanding of the beauty of the Whitsundays.

We did see a stingray in the shallow waters, I at first thought it was a turtle beneath the surface but on closer inspection we spotted a tail and we slowly shuffled backwards (taking pictures in the process of course).

After trying our hand at making a sand octopus and admiring the rival sand turtles made by Dan, Eve and Max, we headed towards the beach entrance where we were due to head on to the lookout.

The lookout is the spot where the postcard photo of Whitehaven Beach is taken, and from Nicola’s pictures you can see why. In total we were on the island and Whitehaven Beach for around 3 hours, and we grudgingly headed back onto the boat, knowing we were never likely to see a more beautiful beach than that which we were leaving.