Hello
from the Great Barrier Reef!
My last four days at Kutchera were busy, but
still fun. On Sunday evening Belinda and
I took a stroll down to the river with the dogs.
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| Belinda |
The water was still warm after the heat of
the day and the dogs had a wonderful time swimming and searching for the rocks
Belinda would toss into the water. Over
the weekend Dan was gone, and he returned with a six week old Border Collie
puppy. She is so cute! Dan has named her Gibbit.
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| Dan with Rocky and Gibbit |
Monday was my final day of fencing. I must admit that while I like riding the
motor bikes and seeing all the scenery, I was very happy to be done with the
hot, dusty work of checking the fences.
On Tuesday I helped Belinda prepare the
lower house for mustering. While bringing
in the cattle to vaccinate and sort, Belinda and her mustering team will make
take their meals in the lower house and use the house itself as a temporary
headquarters. Wednesday we went around
the house doing general chores and I got all of my gear ready to leave.
Thursday was a sad day as I left Kutchera
and said good-bye to everyone. By the
evening the bus had dropped me off in Cairns and my Aunt Carol and Uncle Dana
were there to meet me at the bus station.
We spent the night in Cairns and then were picked up early the next
morning to begin our first, three day adventure out on the Great Barrier
Reef.
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| Sunrise as the boat leaves the harbor on our first day |
We are diving off of a two separate three day live aboard tours with Pro-Dive
Cairns. The first morning we spent doing
safety briefings on our way out to the reef.
The boat ride out to the reef took 3 hours, and most of the
morning. Ater safety briefing, we were
assigned our rooms. The boat has three
levels with 15 bedrooms and 8 heads. Each
bedroom has either a large two person bed, or a set of bunk beds. The top level has three rooms with two heads,
the wheel house and a back deck with benches.
The second level of the boat has the main deck with all of the scuba
equipment, rinse off showers, and duck board where enter and exit the water. Inside on the second level is the galley and
the saloon where we take our meals. And
on the bottom level are more rooms with four more heads. I was assigned a room on this top level which
I was fortunate enough to share with a Maree.
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| Maree |
Maree is a certified diver and buddied up with us on several dives. On this first trip the boat was completely
full. We had a group of about fourteen
gap year kids from Denmark and some other backpackers who were part of two open
water certification classes that were completing their required open water
dives. Besides Aunt Carol, Uncle Dana,
Maree and myself, there were five other certified divers. Four of these divers were also from Denmark
and the fifth was a local diver. There
were also two snorkelers on board.
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| Dining in the Saloon |
The
boat has a captain, cook (this time there was also a cook in training), three
diving instructors because of the number of students, a instructor who was
completing his dive master training, and a dive supervisor. The instructors instruct open water and
advanced open water courses and the dive supervisor does all of the dive
briefings and makes sure that everything runs smoothly. Dive briefings usually consist of a hand
drawn map of the site, complete with depths and areas of special interest. The dive supervisor then informs the
certified divers about the site, and gives us some different dive plans we can
follow for the particular site. The
diver supervisor also sets a maximum dive depth and time.
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| The Great Barrier Reef |
As soon as the boat was secured to the
mooring blocks at our first site, the dive supervisor gave us our briefing and
we donned our gear. All of the gear is
provided by the company, but divers are welcome to bring their own gear as
well. The water was about 85
degrees. Our first dive site was on
Milln Reef and it was a pretty simple site to dive. As soon as we entered the water I could see
fish everywhere. The fish are the most
amazing colors of purple, pink, electric blue, bright green, neon yellow,
orange, and more. The corals are also
brightly colored and the sand is a beautiful white.
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| A Unicorn Fish |
I spent most of the first dive pointing and
blowing bubbles out of my mask, acting like a little kid in a candy store. Swimming on the Barrier Reef is akin to being
dunked into the world’s largest aquarium, and it looks like a scene from Finding Nemo but without the animation
and talking fish. On this first dive, besides
the numerous fish, we saw a moray eel sticking its head out of its den of coral. Our second dive of the day was at the same
location and we continued to see new creatures, including a blue spotted sting
ray and several types of large sea cucumbers.
For our third dive we changed sides of the reef and on that site we saw
a lion fish and a large grouper. The
next day we continued to eat, sleep and dive.
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| Anemone Fish |
We did four dives including a night dive. The first two dives were Flynn Reef, which
has a large bommie in the middle with a wall that goes down to 20 meters on the
side. “Bommie” is the Australian term
for a large outcropping of coral. There
are two types of coral, hard and soft.
The hard corals are little fan like creatures that live together en-masse,
and each creature has its own little limestone shell it secretes for itself. The hard corals expand as the old coral
creatures die and the new ones form their own protective covering on top of the
old coral’s limestone shell.
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| One of the smaller bommies with hard coral |
The third dive we did was a pre-dive to
familiarize ourselves with the location of our night dive. During our afternoon dive I saw a yellow
black-spotted box fish, two turtles, and several kinds of parrot fish. The night dive was not as scary as I thought
it would be. First of all the boat
itself has flood lights underneath, so if you do get lost, all you have to do
is swim toward the light. And secondly,
every diver is equipped with a very bright flash light. The dive location is
known as “Gordons” and it has a group of three bommies known as Mickey
Mouse. At night a large sea turtle named
Brian, sleeps in a sandy alcove at the base of one of the bommies. And we were lucky enough to see Brian asleep
in his home. We were told that Brian is
over one hundred and forty years old. He
is about the size of a medium coffee table.
We also saw a few reef sharks out hunting and lots of little red eyes
from the shrimp hiding between the coral.
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| Sunset at sea |
On our third day we started out on our dive
and I was in charge of navigation. I
failed miserably. I started out all
wrong because when we descended I became turned around and took my compass
heading from the wrong mooring block. We
ended up out in water that was much deeper than the depth we were suppose to be
diving at. Thankfully, Aunt Carol and
Uncle Dana pulled me back from the abyss and we just dived in more shallow
water for the rest of the day. We had
two more dives that morning, both on a very nice reef with plenty of little
bommies. We saw another eel and some
very pretty fish. The boat then returned
to Cairns that afternoon.
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| Aunt Carol after one of our dives |
We
spent the night ashore and then in the morning headed out on the same boat, but
with a new group of divers.
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| Aunt Carol and Uncle Dana enjoying the boat ride |
On the trip back out to the reef we enjoyed the beautiful day and saw some dolphins playing in the waves generated by the boat.
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| Dolphins! |
Yesterday we
spent our first dive back at a familiar reef.
I had no trouble with navigation on that reef. We saw some interesting nudibranchs (sea
slugs) and some beautiful white fan coral.
We then moved on to a new dive sight, named the “whale” because it has a
slit along one side that spews up water like a whale’s blow hole during rough
seas. We saw some more turtles and two
lion fish. The water was beautiful and
the dive was fairly simple. We dove at
the same sight for both our afternoon and night dive and ran across of school
of Bump Headed Parrot fish. The night dive
was beautiful. Hard corals keep their polyps,
or feathery tentacles, hidden inside their shells during the day, but at night
they feed and so the polyps come out.
These feathery structures are generally the same color as the hard outside
of the coral and so it makes the coral seem like it has sprouted colorful fur.
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| A large Butterfly Fish |
Today was another day full of diving. Four dives total. We had three dives sites today. This morning we dove the whale again and saw
an even larger number of Bump Headed Parrot fish, then we changed reefs and
dove on Flynn reef. These sites are now
a bit familiar since we dove on them the last trip. The afternoon and evening dives were
especially good for turtles. This
afternoon Aunt Carol was almost run over by a small female turtle wanting her
picture taken. And then tonight we saw
the large turtle that lives on Gordons dive site. And we also saw a very large trumpet
fish and while we were waiting to climb the ladder back onto the boat we watched the Grey Reef sharks circling around underneath the boat.
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| Sunrise over the ocean |
Tomorrow is our last day of diving and then
we will have a few days of sightseeing.
More photos soon.
