On Tuesday December 23 we boarded the Coral Trekker for a three night sailing trip thru the islands of the Great Barrier Reef. The Coral Trekker is what they call an Australian "Tallship", which I fondly referred to as the pirate ship. :) The Coral Trekker is an old wooden sailboat with eight sails and holds up to eighteen passengers. It was a bit on the primitive side - no air conditioning or hot showers - but that is exactly what gave this part of our trip a more adventurous touch! Shelby said it felt like "camping on a boat". He and the kids chose to sleep up on deck each night, while I preferred to sweat down below. We've never seen so many stars in the sky as we did those three nights! The weather was perfect, both night and day. We were allowed to help raise the sails if we wanted to, or we could just sit back and watch. There were 14 passengers and 4 crew: Julie and Yennick from France were on their honeymoon, Teresa and Mark from Ireland, Audrey and Mark from England, Amanda and Paul with their two children,Georgie(7) and Ben(5) from England, our skipper Ian from Australia, cook Tanya from New Zealand, crewmember Houka from Germany and crewmember Pierre from Belgium. What a wonderful group of people to spend the Christmas holiday with! We truly enjoyed getting to know one another, and Wesley and Kasey especially liked the late night UNO games with Pierre, Houka, Yennick and Julie. Wesley was doing his best to learn conversational French in three days! The plan was to sail in and around the islands of the Great Barrier Reef, most of which are uninhabited. The first day we stopped at Hook Island and went on a cave walk (see above group pic).