My apologies to for not posting this soon after the previous one.  Some of the places I’m staying don’t have the internet capacity to upload and post pics.  Haha, I know a few of you are antsy for more posts (mainly because you let me know on messenger, I appreciate the reminders…you know who you are 😉

Now on to Great Barrier Reef continued…

Woke up the next morning about 0430 to the night gentle rocking of the boat and the pitch black. I could get used to this. Eventually I decided to walk up on deck and watch the beautiful sunrise. So amazing!

    

Right after the beautiful sunrise, we were back in our gear for a beautiful early morning dive. The fish are more active early in the morning and it was so crazy to see. You see more colors and more bright fish closer to the surface, but you get the sharks and bigger fish slightly lower. The mountains of coral balmies stick straight up out of the sand. Most of them don’t seem that big until you descend right next to them and realize that you are looking up at them and it would take a few of you to surround one.

This was looking up from ~10m (~30ft)

Most of the smaller ones look like big brains sticking out of the sand. We also hit a current this morning, which was different. I’m ok without currents. The first morning dive felt like my second dive yesterday. Two steps forward, one back, it’s all part of gaining comfort in the water.

I did finally find Nemo and Crush on this dive.  Seriously what trip to the GBR is complete without finding NEMO!?!

In for a scrumptious breakfast and then a few hours before our next dive. Almost every meal so far I have eaten twice what I normally do and been drinking water like a fish, sheesh we are going through energy. While we wait for our next dive, it had become our thing to play UNO.

The second day was more relaxed than the first. We still had four dives but they were a little more spread out since we were able to start diving earlier. I think my favorite dive of that day was the third dive. This dive site might as well have been a playground for us. Started out that we were supposed to see this “giant clam”. Martin warned us not to let our dive computer dangle below us because if the clam decides to shut, then you are now connected to the clam and the only way to get out is to cut the computer off. So now I have this mental image of two queen-mattress sized clamshells being able to eat a diver. As I swim away from the boat to where this 300 yo clam is, I pass this fairly medium size clam about 2.5-3 feet long.

     

It’s a cool clam but not GIANT, so I just thought I missed it. That’s ok though because the next adventure was swimming through this 15 foot ‘swim through’ in the middle of a ginormous coral balmy! I was kind of nervous at first because it curved and you couldn’t see the other side, plus who know what sort of eel or fish my un-expectantly swim out of the coral.   I also didn’t want to accidentally bump my tank on the coral and possible damage it. Three people had already disappeared into the hole with no problem, so in I went! It was SO COOL!

    

The already comfortable water got much warmer as I entered the 3-foot hole and a slight current allowed me to slowly drift through. It was the coolest thing I’ve done so far!   The hole opened up towards the end onto the beautiful coral bed and right as I turned around Mateo was right behind me, so surreal!

The best part about this dive was that not 300 feet away was a second longer swim through. This one was about 30 feet long.  About 10 feet into the second swim through, the diver in front of me kicked up some sand and made the tunnel slightly murky. Nothing like being in a 30 foot long 3 foot wide descending tunnel and not being able to see 2 feet in front of you! It’s not like I could turn around either. Only choice was to slowly continue to drift through the remainder of the tunnel only slightly touching the coral with as little contact as possible to not knock into it. In the end no eel or shark was hiding in wait and I made it to the other side!

       

I forgot to mention that on the second dive of the second day, when we jumped in the water, we came face to face with a 6-foot long barracuda just chilling underneath the boat. It wasn’t uncommon to see fish just hanging out there waiting for a scrap of food to fall overboard but this was the first time I had seen a barracuda! I politely stared back as him as Mateo and I quickly descended away from him. Later as we finished our dive, Mr. Barracuda was still just chilling under the boat.

I just happened to be one of the last divers in the water and as I was taking my fins off to climb out he sorta just scooted a bit closer. All I could think was “No thank you Mr Barracuda, these toes are NOT fish snacks, haha, you keep your sweet self on that side of the boat!”

After we got back on deck after the third dive everyone was talking about the ‘giant clam’ and how cool it was and I finally realized that what I thought was ‘just-a-medium-sized’ clam was in fact the giant clam. Not gonna lie, I wasn’t THAT impressed with it. We were also chatting about the ‘huge barracuda’ under the boat as well because a few people had missed seeing him, to which my response was “it wasn’t that big, maybe 6-feet” At this point in the discussion, I got called out. Apparently nothing in the Great Barrier Reef was ‘big enough’ or ‘impressive enough’ for me, the guys said laughingly. They started calling it ‘Laura’s Barely Barrier Reef’. Sheesh, can’t go anywhere without getting flack for something 😉

That night was the final night dive. After last night, I was both ready and not ready to get back in the water. I was determined to have an awesome dive though! Because we had a guide last night, they thought we would all be fine on our own today. So Mateo and I joined up with Richard and Pompous, for lack of a better name. We were going to do the same dive that we had just done for our last dive. At least there would be some familiarity. We all got dressed and hoped back into the dark water. Mateo at this point told us he was turning over nav to Richard and I, thanks Mateo. The decent was fine, we made it to the bottom and then headed off in the direction we were supposed to. Little known to us until later, the current had picked up since our last dive, so we were trudging along and all of a sudden I see the mooring stones for the end of our dive site. We had gone too far and we were farther right than expected. At this point there was a lot of pointing at the mooring stone, shrugging to ask where we were, and hesitant point in the direction I thought we should be going. It had to be a comedy to anyone looking in from the outside. So back and left we went until we ran into the medium sized giant clam. Success, we were back on track! Needless to say, no one at this point even considered swimming through the swim throughs. As much as it would have been cool to do, we all were in no mood to get stuck or lost again. After about 15 more minutes we decided to head back and semi-successfully made our way back to the boat. The ship spotlight was a great beacon once we made it in the vicinity of the ship. Safe back at home! A good end to an awesome day!

    

The third day was perfect. I felt comfortable enough in the water now to be a little more adventurous and daring than previous days. I didn’t mind hanging out near the fishies and just chilling over a coral balmy looking straight down at the wildlife. The third day also happened to be a shallower dive site. Honestly, I think I liked these shallower dives the best. Everything we had seen so far was beautiful in its own right but the more shallow coral was more colorful I thought and had more tropical fish swimming in and out of it. At one point I just stopped swimming and let the slight current take me over the coral as I drifted overtop. I wish I could have spent longer just chilling over the coral, so beautiful!

As we are headed back to Cairns, I’m excited and sad. It has been a great trip, one for the books definitely! I have completed a major adventure on my bucketlist and it did not disappoint. But I am also sad to be leaving! This is definitely the highlight of my Australia trip and possibly overall. I also got to do so many things that I never imagined I would; night dives, drift dives, solo dives, swim throughs, and swimming with sharks! And it was all just truly amazing!

2 comments

  1. Your “Not Impressed” reminded me of the girl looking thru the telescope at a star and stating “Is that it?” Duh. It’s a star! Ha Ha!

    1. Haha! Yeah I forgot about that! I mean it’s cool and everything but I want to really SEE it!

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