Mission Beach

Mission Beach was a completely unplanned stop on our drive from Cairns to Townsville as it appeared to be one of the few opportunities during the drive that the rain was relenting and the clouds were starting to lift. Steve says “let’s take a quick detour, Mission Beach looks interesting”. We could never have guessed what would happen ….

There was a woman patrolling the beach when we arrived, and occasionally her radio would squawk. We got chatting and it turned out she was the ground spotter for a skydive that was about to commence. All of a sudden we hear a “drop” from the pilot and when we look up we see a tiny dot in the sky above. This develops into 7 dots, then 7 parachutes and we follow them all the way down to a landing zone no more than 50m from us. Incredible skill and accuracy as they could not afford to land in the water, which would certainly have been Steve’s biggest fear.

It turns out it was a tandem jump, and 7 very excited and full of adrenaline tourists squeal on the beach (well 6 were women).

We could not believe our luck that at the precise, unplanned moment that we had hit this spot for no more than a 10 minute looksie, this amazing thing happened. After the jump, the spotter told us that 5 minutes either way and the jump would have been called off as the cloud cover would have been too much.

Anyway, we jumped in the car and before we left Mission Beach city limits, the heavens opened! Steve feels he is so lucky to have Nikki in his life because if he had been on his own, he would have walked on beach, got bitten by something, probably a tiger, and been rushed to hospital. Or maybe we generate the luck together.

Tip: click on the 1st image, Nikki looking at the beach, to open the lightbox and see if you can see the dots in the sky.