Hervey Bay

I took a very excited, nervous and scared Claudia up to Hervey Bay a week before the season began in late July. The original idea was to stay in a hostel as she was not going to be paid much. It was going to be one of those jobs that you did for love, not money. She started out in a place on the front called Bucaneers Backpackers or something like that. It has since closed anyway. It was a little neglected, but it seemed quiet and the people who ran it were nice enough. We spent the weekend getting Claudia settled in and met David, the skipper. I had to be back at work on Monday. The drive was a good four and a half hours in Helga and I headed back late that Sunday night. Claudia was desperately unsure of herself and there were floods of tears. She was scared she would get seasick, not understand what clients said to her or just generally fail at what she had to do. Leaving her there, I felt like a parent leaving their child at school for the first day.

Needless to say, Claudia Steiger took to it like a duck to water. I visited a fortnight later having given her a bit of time to settle in and get her confidence. She was loving it. The first week had been spent preparing the boat for the season. It got taken out of the water, the hull was scrapped and they painted her. By the time I visited they had been going out every day and she had all the routines off pat, which on an old, converted fishing boat like Princess II was great to watch. Princess II had the best package of all the boat trips running out of Harvey Bay - and I think there were eight of those. The clients were picked up if necessary and the boat left at 07h00 sharp. There was bottomless tea and coffee with cake in the morning and afternoon and a big BBQ for lunch. The hospitality was great all day and the whales never disappointed. (OK they did once, when we took friends Ian and Kate out, but that was the day after the best breaches ever and Sod's Law.)

In the early days, the trips were co-ordinated with a spotter plane, but now, whether there are more whales or more boats or both, they are not a problem to find. Princess II just chugged out to Platypus Bay and back, she was the slowest and oldest and that is why trips in her were an all-day affair. The bigger boats would hare out to the bay in twenty minutes, they were an assortment of catamarans and fancy charter boats with high tech engines. Their guests always struck me as the sort of people going out because friends had told them they had to do that when they were up in the region or they had seen a programme on TV that featured one of the high profile boats. They stayed at the fancier hotels, let their children run amock and went inside for a beer and a chat with friends when nothing was happening outside. Not Princess II's passengers. They were always a cheery lot who were not in a rush to fit every other site in on the same day. They would have their own binoculars and were quite often regulars who would come along every year and they were the sort of people you could strike up a conversation with and not have to find a different bit of the rail to lean on after five minutes. In the midst of all this was Claudia, very tanned and very happy. She had built up a huge file of downloaded data on whales and whale-watching and studied for ages before she left Brisbane. She could answer the most technical, scientific and anatomical questions that any guest could throw at her. Indeed, it was funny to hear about her biting her tongue when David responded to a question with an answer that ten years ago was an accepted fact, but recent studies had suggested that.......! and Claudia would have had the details of those recent studies to hand. Sweet.

A full day out was long and getting back from a trip out generally meant you were asleep by eight. Claudia did not have that luxury. Once back, the boat had to be emptied and washed down. She then had to cycle home to shower and change for her second job.