Fish on the Reef
D goes snorkeling
Elephant Ear Coral
Steephead Parrotfish
Six-Bar Wrasse
School of Scissor-Tailed Sergeants
Chad underwater
Coral Trout
Giant Sea Clam
Finger Coral
Blue (Neon) Damselfish
Coral Reef
D & Chad on the duck deck
Codfish schooling under the boat
Jellyfish in the open water
Chad with Giant Sea Clams
Living Aboard
When we left for Cairns, we had one thing planned for the trip: a SCUBA certification class. When we learned on our arrival that we would not be able to take it, we seriously considered shortening our time on the Great Barrier Reef or bailing on it altogether.
Fortunately, we came to our senses and remembered that spending time on the Reef was the main reason we had come to far north Queensland, and we could still do that as snorkelers. So, early in the morning of Thursday the 16th we borrowed our snorkeling equipment and boarded the 25-person Pro-Dive boat to live in the open water for the next two nights.
A live-aboard trip on the Reef is not cheap, but in our opinion it's definitely worth the extra expense, and the price includes all meals and equipment. Space is used, well, "efficiently," so the private rooms are small and the bathrooms even smaller. (The entire bathroom itself doubles as the shower stall, so you have to be careful not to start washing the sink when you reach for your back.)
The food, though, was yummy and plentiful.
After eating, we took our plates out of the "dry zone" of the common area
onto the dive deck (shown above left), where we rinsed off the food particles in a hose right into the sea. Obviously the big fishes in the photo here were familiar with the routine, because they hung around the boat all the time, waiting for a hookless nibble.
The Reef
Two hours or so after leaving the Pro-Dive shop in downtown Cairns, we got our first glimpse of the legendary Great Barrier Reef, which looks rather unimpressive from above. Reefs, we learned at "Reef Teach" the night before our trip, come in a couple of varieties: fringing (found adjacent to islands or mainland shores), platform (freestanding in shallow water between the mainland and the edge of the continental shelf), and ribbon, or "barrier" reefs, which are only found at the edge of the continental shelf, 30 kms from shore. One of the advantages of a live-aboard trip is that you can go to the ribbon reefs, which are a bit of a hike for day trips.
We were able to do three one-hour dives each day, at five different dive sites on three different reefs. Two of our dive sites were located on Flynn Reef, and two on Milln Reef, which is the reef pictured above. In the background you can see the long sandy-colored formation that is Milln Reef, and in the foreground you can see a smaller round formation called a "bommmie," from an aboriginal word for "mountain under water" (or so we were told). The dive boats moor on the inland side of the reef, and the divemaster briefs all the divers and snorkelers on the formations in the area and the recommended route for exploration, taking into consideration the current and the depth requirements of the divers.
Our dive company had strict and excessive procedures to ensure that all passengers returned from a dive and that no one was left behind when the boat moved. In addition to having each person sign in and sign out (with cool waterproof paper and pencil), the skipper of the boat assigned each of us a "safety number" and had to look every person in the eye and get their safety number before he moved to a new location. We were highly amused by the "safety number" system, until we learned later that it was on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998 that two American tourists were infamously left behind by their dive company and never found. The tourist industry in Cairns is evidently still trying to recover, though you can't tell by looking...
Snorkeling
While both of us have frequently been swimming, our experience snorkeling was quite limited.
Fortunately, it's easy to catch on, if you don't mind some mouthfuls of salt water and a sore jaw from biting down.
Included in the price of the trip was the rental of all the equipment we needed-- including a prescription vision mask for D to wear, flippers, and full-body wetsuits.
Ostensibly, the wetsuits were to keep us warm and to protect us from "stingers," which is a very cute word that refers to very deadly jellyfish. Fortunately, stingers were out of season and the water was quite warm
so we had the option to snorkel without the full suits.
Chad took this option almost immediately, since the wetsuits add buoyancy and he wanted to dive deep-- but D got tired of the soggy chafing suit pretty soon and dropped it too,
which, incidentally, is how she got her sunburn, despite frequent application and re-application of waterproof high power sunblock. The most unexpected injury was the cuts and chafes around our ankles from the flippers, and we learned from the more experienced divers like our new friend Nick in the photo here how to wrap our ankles in masking tape to protect them.
Then, we were all suited up and had nothing to do but dive in... (or rather, jump feet first kind of awkwardly) ...stick our faces in the water, and start kicking.
What wondrous things would we see?
Wondrous Things We Saw
In short, it was an utterly magical, indescribable experience. Although, you can read D's attempt to describe it in her 16 June journal entry. We saw so many wondrous things, it's hard to know where to begin.
We found Nemo, for one thing, and many of his friends. The Clownfish pictured above left is shown in his sea anemone, which delivers a poisonous sting to anything that touches it except a clownfish. The Moorish Idol on the right is an angelfish that served as the model for the character Gill in the Nemo aquarium.
In fact, it was striking how much the Reef really did look like Nemo's world, although it was clearly not CGI. We saw things like Green Sea Turtles and Giant Sea Clams (pictured left) that seemed to belong in fairy tales rather than real life.
We saw more kinds and colors and shapes of fish than we could count or identify, from the lone small fish that wiggled in front of our face, to the unexpectedly calm school of large Diagonal-Banded Sweetlips (pictured right).
Though they were all magical and alien to us, most of what we saw was quite common on the reef. On one dive, though, we spotted some
bizarre translucent things near the surface in a sort of line. At first we took them to be jellyfish, but watching them we realized they were actually reef squid (pictured above).
The most exciting thing we saw, though, were white-tipped reef sharks-- or rather, one white-tipped reef shark at a time, three different times. Our closest encounter with a reef shark was, fortuitously, the only time we had a camera with us, and it also happened to be just minutes before we were called out of the water to return to the boat.
Reef sharks are some of the smaller members of the shark family, and they do not tend to be aggressive. Our shark started to approach us when D was rewinding the camera, but he quickly turned away when we started to move. We had learned at "Reef Teach" that reef sharks rarely attack divers because we don't look like food and it's physically painful for them to bite us. We actually learned quite a lot about what we were seeing from "Reef Teach," which is a nightly show/lecture delivered by an Irish expat marine biologist, with free cookies. It's highly recommended by pretty much everyone, and we heartily second that recommendation. You, too, can check out the Reef Teach website here, although it doesn't have much of the incredibly usefulinformation that Paddy gives out.
Before we knew it, our nine dives were over and we were back on land, with just memories and photographs of all the wondrous things we'd seen.
Dark-Tailed Sea Perch
The Top of the Reef
School of Green Chromis
Chad goes snorkeling
Staghorn Coral
Fish on the Reef
Striped Bristle-Tooth
D & Chad in snorkeling gear
Coral Reef
Scissor-Tailed Sergeant
School of Female Parrotfish
D underwater
Checkerboard Wrasse & a Sergeant Major
Steephead Parrotfish
Turtleweed
Elephant Coral
D "flying"
