Friday - Pictures from Lizard Island

After a wonderful time at Lizard Island, we have made our way back to Cairns where we are waiting for our flight to Sydney. So we thought we would post some of our pictures from the last few days.

Here are a bunch of pictures from Craig's outer reef dive on Tuesday. There are a few pictures of Craig "petting" the potato cod, one of some black tip reef sharks, a morey eel, a clown fish, and two pictures of the boat captain feeding "Charlie" the giant grouper and the nurse shark.














Here are also a couple other pictures from our dinners and activities on Lizard Island.
Our private beach dinner:


Also, here is a little guy that hung around our room at Lizard Island. We found him 3 separate times, always as we left for dinner - on the pathway to our room, guarding right outside our door, and, in this instance, perched next to the light switch.

On Thursday, we slept in and relaxed in the morning - which worked out well since it was raining! Luckily, it stopped around 9:30am. Then, we took out a motorized dinghy packed with towels, a beach umbrella, a picnic lunch, and our snorkel gear. It only took about 20 minutes to get over to our first stop "Mermaid Cove" where we anchored and unpacked. We went snorkeling for about 45 minutes and saw some great sea life. We then had our nice picnic on the beach. Our only company was a few seagulls. We then did another snorkel on the other side of the cove (30 minutes). Afterwards, we packed up our boat and motored around the corner to another large beach - "Watson's Bay" where the main attraction is the "Clam Garden" where they are a ton of giant clams. We anchored again and swam out (pretty far!) to get a look at this - it was certainly a sight! Some of the clams are estimated to be up to 80 years old. There were lots of great colors. We also saw some stingrays (much to my chagrin), clown fish, and a bunch of other cool fish.





We got back to the hotel around 3:30pm and Craig headed out to hike up to Cook's Look. This is the highest point on Lizard Island and where Captain Cook mapped out his route through the Great Barrier Reef over 200 years ago. The very strenuous hike is about 4k through some pretty dense "jungle" (not to mention that it was raining on and off). He did manage to return before dark!




After Craig dried off and cleaned up, we headed for our last dinner on Lizard Island. The rain meant that it was a bit cooler in the evening which was nice. Also, we had kangaroo loin as our main course which was fun to experience!



On Friday morning, we had time for breakfast and quite a bit of snorkeling (Craig) before we headed off. Our plane back to Cairns was slightly bigger (room for 7 passengers plus the pilot) and it went very smoothly. The weather was quite clear and we had a beautiful view of the Great Barrier Reef.



The Cairns airport is not much to write about but our time sitting here has passed quickly as we write this and upload pictures. We are looking forward to getting back to Sydney and to the Blue Mountains.