March 1st - Arlie Beach Australia

I hate to be repetitive but…it was another hot and humid day but we must be getting used to it because it didn’t affect us as much.  A nice breeze blowing throughout the day certainly helped.

Today was another tender port, but unlike yesterday we got to ride on the much larger ferries hired by Cunard to transport passengers.  The pictures below show the seating in the morning when we went over.  I also got a good shot of the inside of an empty ship’s tender so you can see the difference.  The leg room in the ship’s tender is non-existent and there is no air conditioning.  The last picture shows how far away the ship was from shore.

Arlie Beach is a resort town frequented by Australians because of its access to the Great Barrier Reef.  The ship had another excursion to the reef today. This one was $246 pp.  We talked to a guy who took the one from Yorkey’s Knob yesterday.  He said it was great but they did have to wear the stinger suits.  He said they were REALLY hard to take off.  He also said they had flotation vests for non-swimmers.  I didn’t know that, I thought knowing how to swim was a requirement.

When there is a tender port like today, shore excursions go off first and then the other passengers can get a numbered ticket to determine when they can go ashore.  Once you have your ticket you have to remain in the lounge area and then you’re escorted down to the tender platform.  We didn’t have an excursion and I didn’t want to wait in the lounge with hundreds of other folks.  We waited until ‘general’ boarding was allowed.  Once this was announced you can go down to the tender platform whenever you want and get on the next available tender.  Today this occurred around 11AM and that suited us just fine.

As usual there were volunteers waiting to point you in the right direction to see the sites.  In Arlie Beach the town and its surroundings are the sites.  It’s a beautiful little town and a pleasure to walk around and talk to the locals.  They’re used to cruise ships and are pleasantly chatty. 

We had a great lunch, some reasonably good ice cream and did a little shopping.  I bought a bouse.  While I was trying it on another lady from our ship was buying the same one.  Uh-oh.  Hopefully we won’t run into one another on the ship!

Sometime ago we decided to cancel our world cruise scheduled for 2021.  It is a great itinerary on Holland America but it’s two weeks longer then this one and really, I don’t think we can do it two years in a row.  This is a long time on a ship, although of course we don’t regret it one bit.  We decided to use some of our newly awarded future cruise credit and scheduled a couple of transatlantics for next spring.  It will give us a month in Europe, something we always wanted to do…but that’s next years trip…tomorrow we have a sea day and then we’re in Brisbane for the day.  Can’t wait.

Oh, and today officially marks us as being back on schedule…we were supposed to be in Arlie Beach on March 1^st on the original schedule.  Fingers crossed we won’t have any other changes!