Driving from Tin Can Bay to Maaroom we intended to have an explore of the small villages/locations along the way. Tinnabar, Tawan, Poona, Boonooroo.

I wasn't surprised to find that Tawan was a location and not a village but was disappointed to find that Esplanade Road marked on Hema Maps did not exist. This photo is as close as we got to the beach.

Well the great Sandy Straits are not just sand, there are quite significant areas of mud and mangroves.

The tide is in this morning.

Is this the ideal beach shack?

The Fraser Island Barge about to land at Inskip Point.

After watching the dolphins have breakfast and us having breakfast too we headed off to explore Rainbow Beach and Inskip Point.

There are a number of National Park Camp sites along beach side of the point. Naturally I drove in to a couple to check them out. We were surprised to see that every second camp had one or more dogs - isn't this a National Park. Turns out that all the camp sites here are dog friendly 🙁 . I am still of the view that National Parks should be domestic animal free but in any case surely some of the camp sites could be dog free for those of us that choose not of have or leave our dogs at home.

To me dog friendly makes a mockery of all the signs along the beach access points pointing out not to disturb the shore birds or nesting turtles.

The barge unloading at Inskip.

As well as access to the barge Inskip is a popular recreation area.

Looking across the water to the vehicles unloading on Fraser Island.

We didn't see any one getting bogged at Inskip while we were there not even the local copper.

No photos of Rainbow Beach just a comment. Tin Can Bay is still maintaining a quite fishing village feel - Rainbow Beach already feels like the new Noosa.

Big move today to Tin Can Bay we did manage to go via Cooloola Cove and Woolworths though.

Pretty sure these colourful poly boats are tenders for the houseboats you can hire.

There is a small pod of wild dolphins that come into Barnacles Cafe for breakfast most mornings. This is a young member of the pod and is lucky this morning as he turned up late but as the volunteers were still here having their breakfast they gave him a feed.

One of the older dolphins showing off.

The older dolphins have more of the pink/white colouration while the younger ones tend to be mostly slate grey.

Ann hand feeding a dolphin.

Breakfast dolphin style.

Juvenile dolphin in the shallows.

Ann purchased a hands on 1 hour flight from the Sunshine Coast Flying School for me.

It was much more hands on than I expected. Jason had me using the stick to control our ascent virtually as soon as we took off.

Turning around Double Island to head back towards Gympie.

Click on the image for a short you tube video