Lockey

After we returned from the Whitsundays our skipper Lockey informed us that the fun wasn't over yet. The company that books trips on Waltzing Matilda invites everyone on the trip to a local bar called Beaches the night they return for a round of drinks and socializing. We had originally intended to catch a bus at 7:40PM to head down to Hervey Bay but managed to change our ticket to the 11:40PM bus so we could join in the festivities.

We didn't spend much time on character development in the previous posts about the Whitsundays, and really there were too many great people on the trip to describe, but I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about Lockey.

Lockey is just about everything you would expect in the skipper of a small sailboat. Average height, thin, tattooed, a nice mop of curly unkept hair, extremely tan and simply put, a character. Many of his mannerisms honestly reminded me of Jack Sparrow. I asked Lockey how long he had been sailing and he simply held his hand a couple feet off the ground and said "since I was about yay big." Even his name sounds like he could be a character from Pirates of the Caribbean.

We met up with some of the other folks from the trip at beaches around 7:30PM. Most of them were from the U.K. - a handful of brits, an irish couple and one german. 8:30 rolled around and we were wondering if Lockey was going to show up. Fashionably late, he meandered into the bar and up to our table around 9, greeted by cheers from the group. In classic pirate... I mean sailor fashion he ordered a jug of rum and coke. After a few rounds of drinks at Beaches Lockey decided it was time to move on and brought us to a bar up the road (right next to the YHA) called Phoenix. We only spent an hour or so at this bar before it was time for us to say goodbye and catch our overnight bus to Hervey Bay. What a great couple of days.