Whale watching!

But first... here is the promised picture of the sunset:

The bat shots are a bit dark and I'm on macca (Australian for McDonalds) wifi so uploading is a ballache.

For mine and Mathias' birthday presents my ma and pa paid for us to go on a whale watching trip at Hervey Bay. The pick up time was 7:40am, which we thought would be painful, however the plus side of jetlag is the ability to get up at 6am without an alarm. We even managed to go for an early morning stroll on the beach before the shuttle bus arrived.

Side note - there are so many birds here! They start calling at dawn and they don't stop all morning. There must be a lot of different varieties as there are many different calls. I was lying in bed on my first morning here enjoying listening to them when in entered the most annoying bird ever! You know when someone is testing all the different ring tones on their phone? Well this was the bird equivalent of that, except all its different calls sounded like different car alarms. He drowned out all the other birds and did a cycle through all this different WAAAAAAAHWAAAAAAAHWAAAAAAAAHs.

Anyway...

At about 8:30am we set off on the boat - the Spirit of Hervey Bay - and headed up the Fraser Island coast. We quickly came across a pod of whales, one of whom was slapping his pectoral fins on the water to attract females. He was obviously super horny because he was thrashing around in the water a lot. I have a video but, again, the wifi is too poor here to upload it. Here's a photo instead:

We moved off and found other pods later, and eventually came across 3 teenage whales that were quite interested in the boat. They were circling around us and diving under us, it was amazing! I waited around the front of the boat and eventually one of the whales came out of the water right by me! I have a video but the internet is too shit. I'll upload later.

Here it is showing us its belly and tail:

Just at the end we saw a fully grown female - she was HUGE - and her baby! It was funny that we thought it was so cute and small when, in reality, it was 2 tonne when it was born and it only seemed small because we had been watching these giant creatures all day.

Fun fact for you: Human milk is 2% fat, whereas whales milk is 42% fat. It is so thick it is almost solid, and the mother excretes it into the water and the baby then swims into it, drinking it up. Enjoy your cereal, folks!

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