Chatting with Sylvia and Stewart on Wednesday morning (10 August), it turned out they were heading to White Sandy Beach that day and they invited me along. These two are awesome. They are in their 60s and so much fun. They remind me of my friend Leigh. Something to aspire to! They had a boat booked and just as we were about to give up on him, he arrived ready to take us on our tour. Luckily he was quite unperturbed about the fact an extra person was coming along, as long as I didnt expect fins. He had a spare mask. This was the inspiration for me to buy my own mask. Lets just say, not sure when it was cleaned last!!
The boat was an outrigger canoe, which essentially is a quite heavy long, deep and narrow wooden canoe with bamboo outriggers each side and an engine on the back. Very stable, but a bit splashy as I discovered sitting up front on the way out to our first snorkelling spot! There was a set of small islands off the coast of Candidasa that, when viewed as a group from the right angle, resembled a whale. The boat stopped near the biggest of the three and we jumped overboard for some quite good snorkelling. Lots of fish, big variety of species and lots of colour. The current was quite good that day so no real chore to swim around without fins while checking out the underwater world! When we had enough there, it was back into the boat and onward to White Sandy Beach (yes, this is its name...not a description). Here there are free sunbeds on the beach, several bars (which always makes Stuart happy!) and restaurants, the usual beach peddlers and yes, you guessed it, a white sandy beach. It is not that common in this area of Bali so we viewed it as a bit of a novelty. Sylvia and I, sun worshippers that we are, laid in the sun and Stewart in the shade. Silvia is much better than I at the sun worshipping thing and I was soon in the shade as well. The surf was calm here this day which was great as it had been unusually rough in the last week or so! We had until 1pm at the request of the skipper so after several beers under the sun umbrellas it was up to the restaurant that Brad recommended for a delicious lunch. We had left it a bit late to order and the service is never that fast in most of the places I visited in Bali so we had to ask several times. The answer was always that it was about to be served. We managed to get our order eventually and may have been a little late getting to the boat, but we certainly werent getting the hurry up from the skipper.
It appeared that all the boats were carried up the beach while the skippers waited for their passengers. That means you had to get them back down the beach again. These boats are pretty heavy and this is quite the task as shown by the photo. They made it look easy, but as we were to discover a bit later, it is not necessarily so! The trip back
was fun and there was some beautiful scenery. When we arrived back at the hotel we discovered the reason we needed to be back. The tide was out and getting the boat over the built up seabed around the breakwater was challenging. It had the skipper and Stewart outside the boat, outrigger around shoulders and willing the waves to give them some momentum. They did an excellent job and the two princesses stepped from the boat inside the breakwater without difficulty...:)! I do love being a girl!! 
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