26th Dec – Boxing Day and the Turtles

Today was Andrews last day with us as he was rostered on at work, so we hit the road to visit Wollumbin Mount Warning, it was the central plug of a huge shield shaped volcano. With limited time we only managed to do a 20-30 min walk through the rainforest, it was very noisy due to the cicadas.....to be honest this is an understatement. It was so loud the sound made your ears hurt it was truly incredible. With Andrew needing to leave for home and for the rest of us to get ready for our snorkel with the turtles we headed back to Fingal.


The weather didn’t look great leading up to the afternoon, but it seemed to be holding out for now. Wet-suited up we headed on a small charter boat across to Cook Island with the Watersports Guru. It was just the 6 of us and there were no other boats around the Island, we travelled a short distance to the end of the Tweed River and continued South along the coast (only 10min) to be greeted by dozens of dolphins swimming near the island. Cook Island was first named Turtle Island in 1823 then changed to Cook Island 5 years later. We were incredibly lucky, we may not have seen Nemo, but we certainly saw loads of turtles (Hawksbill, Green and Loggerhead Turtles) all ranging from 25 to 105 years old. Apparently they don’t come back near shore until they are at least 25 years old. The water was a little cold, but the excitement of seeing dozens of turtles, a huge stingray, 2 Wobbegong sharks and cute little puffer fish kept us entertained. As we swam near the Island the swell had us floating backwards and forwards with the turtles, sometimes we had about 6 turtles within our view less than 5 metres away. The boys got a little chilli so they headed back to the boat, but they managed to see and touch several of the turtles during their time in the water. It was a very surreal experience, floating around with these amazing turtles, the big turtles in particular were not worried by us being there at all.

Once we returned to the cabin we were all worn out, and with no one wanting to cook, we headed down the road to pick up some take away Chinese!

















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