Wednesday 25/2/2015 Day 50 Very warm Sea Day to Airlie Beach along the Great Barrier Reef

Most of today we have had a local sea pilot on board to help navigate through the very shallow waters along the part of the Queensland coast famous for the Great Barrier Reef. It’s at times like this that I understand the attraction of snorkelling (although I never took it up), because one of tomorrow’s tours takes groups out in a catamaran for snorkelling, swimming and deeper sub aqua.

 We will still be in Australia heaven as we will be spending the day on the beautiful land at Airlie Beach with Whitsunday Island panoramas.  The ship will be anchored 3 miles away from the coast and local tenders will be taking us across.

There are 3 captain’s nautical nuggets/ expressions to ponder today. “No great shakes”, “Scraping the bottom of the barrel” and “Slush fund”

Meat used to be preserved in wooden barrels and when the meat had been used up the residue from the barrels could be scraped out, sold on for use in candle making, the proceeds of which became known as a slush fund and would more often than not be used by the cook who had scraped the bottom of the barrel. 

No great shakes referred to the practice of shaking a barrel of liquid to see if there was anything left.  If there wasn’t much left (i.e. no great shakes”) the barrel could be broken down to save space.

We are fit as a butchers dog with all our walking, and calm calm calm with today's painting of a young woman seated in Virasana.

It has been a really lovely day today, and unbelievably already day 50!  Back tomorrow x