Turquoise Bay

Wednesday 22nd
Something that we found unusual here was that the wind would start at about 5am and build up so that the mornings were quite windy but by the afternoon it was dead calm! Also everywhere we were swimming, the water in the shallow was cold but as you swam out deeper it got warmer. Opposite to what we are use to.
Due to not driving anywhere and doing a lot of swimming we had not been doing a lot of school work so we took the windy morning as an opportunity to do some school work, in the caravan. After lunch we headed for Turquoise Bay, apparently another great snorkeling location. There were again a lot of fish, blue spotted fantail rays and these fish in the sand shallows that even Manning and Zane could swim with called a dart fish with spots on it's side. They were about 30 to 40 cm long.

These were very funny fish that just followed you everywhere. There was a lot to see here again and you could go out deeper and there were a lot of fish around big lots of coral. I swam over a blue spotted fantail ray but he/she just didn't even care I was there. That was the amazing thing, swimming with sea creatures that were so use to humans that they went about their day eating, just making sure they didn't get hit by flippers, but all was just another day to them.
On our way back to the caravan we stopped at a tap in the middle of nowhere that was put there for people to fill up their drinking water, but look what we found there........

....an emu sitting there drinking. I guess the sign didn't say "no emus"! Anyway Tim had been telling the kids all the stories about what you can do to get the emus attention and it will come over to you, so the kids begged us to stop and let them try these out.

So as you can see the emu was put off his water and started to walk away, then it stopped, looked at the crazy humans, wondered whether they had an illness or convulsions, thought without hands it couldn't really help these humans so it wandered back to the little puddle of water to finish it's drinking. The enthusiastic humans gave up on the first myth and tried the second.

Some tried to walk like an emu and others, though you can't see, had hats on their hands to make the emu think they were emus. We must have struck the only intelligent emu in Australia as it had had enough of these games and decided to leave these weird humans to their games.