Gordon's Mooring, Flynn Reef
Great Barrier Reef, Australia (off Cairns, Queensland)
aboard Scuba Pro II (vessel)

17 June 2005

At Pellow Reef yesterday afternoon, we rented an underwater digital camera from the boat staff to try to capture some photographs of our experience here. AUS$40.00 got us the camera for one dive, plus a CD of the images. We were assured that we could get good photos while snorkeling, and that the "good" camera for hire would far exceed the disposable underwater cameras we had already bought.

It ruined the dive for me.

The light was wrong, the reef wasn't that great, and all the careful advice they gave us was better for SCUBA divers than it was for snorkellers. As was the camera, which required steadiness-- exactly what we don't have while snorkelling. Fifteen minutes in, I had to give the camera to Chad, because I was so frustrated with it. On my third time ever swimming at the Great Barrier Reef, I could no longer see it as it was in the moment. I could only see what it wasn't, from the point of view of a camera.

It was painful for me to realize this, but it was a good lesson. One I maybe neded to get at this point in my life. This morning, before breakfast, we went out again at Pellowe Reef, and I realized that it simply isn't that good a site for snorkelling-- but that's not the point. The point is that all the wonder and awe I had experience the first two times I ever saw the Great Barrier Reef simply evaporated with a camera around my wrist. I stoped travelling, and I became the worst kind of tourist, the kind who is not really there where they are. I was somewhere else.

Part of it, I know, had to do with the fact that I had spent a good deal of money and I only had the camera for 45 minutes. (When, later, I took our disposable cameras instead, it became fun again and was not nearly so traumatic.) But as I spend more and more time and money preserving and presenting my experiences in scrapbooks and on webpages, I need to be careful that I don't stop having them.