An Adventure to Phillip Island

As part of our Christmas gift from The (now former) President & First Lady, we where given a voucher to have an Ultimate Penguin Tour at Phillip Island.

We have both been and seen the Penguins on a number of occasions, but The President & First Lady did this tour last year and loved it! 

So, we took a Friday afternoon off work, and headed down to the Island for an overnight stay (Maggie was picked up by Lucille in the arvo for a sleep over with the First Family).

At 5.30 we arrived at the Penguin Parade centre to check in for our tour. We meet the rest of our group (there was 7 including us - they have a limit of 10 people/day) and had a full briefing with our ranger, got geared up (headset, wet weather/wind gear, backpack, seat & night vision goggles!) and headed off to our own private beach (Shelley Beach) for the viewing. 

Our ranger was very informative. We sat down on the beach just as the first wave of Penguins started to come out of the water. It was amazing to be so close to them. Often they would walk past us about 1meter away. As part of the Centres research, our ranger roughly counted the number of penguins that came out of the water in front of us, and it was over 200. Pretty good numbers, and there was more all up and down the beach.

After about 50min of sitting and watch (through the night vision goggles!), we headed off the beach and walked back to the centre. This took about an hour, even though it wasn't a far walk (maybe just over 1km). We stopped and watched Penguins heading home, standing out the front of their burrows 'talking', saw other native animals and chatted about the penguins and the Centre.

Coming back into the Centre, we headed in though the research area, and got a super up close (almost brushing past our legs) visit with some very large Little Penguins! The Penguins who have homes right outside the doors of the Centre are often found wondering inside the research buildings if doors are left open.

The tour was AMAZING! and we would definitely recommend it to anyone who heads down to Phillip Island, even if you have seen the Penguins at the main viewing area of the Centre, this is a much better way to see them, and to have the ranger there giving commentary and answering questions is great.

Shelley Beach

Native geese

The next day, we went and visited the beach we went to and also went and had a look at The Nobbies.

Seal Rock

Bubbles checking out the Penguin tracks & burrows