I’m currently reading Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey and I felt that this excerpt was appropriate to depict the feeling I had when we all jumped from the boat and ducked into the water only to hear the whales talking to each other in that faint incredible sound. I’ll never forget that moment. Airlie Beach and my sailing trip in the Whitsundays islands is my favourite part of my Australian trip. Lying on the deck at night gazing at the stars, having a delicious barbecue dinner and sleeping on a subtly cradling water.

“Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don’t, that the sound of their uprorar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness.”