Scuba on The Great Barrier Reef

August 17-18, 2009
You can’t be in Australia without spending some time on the Great Barrier Reef. We decided that we wanted to go to the outer reef and scuba dive and snorkel on the more secluded areas. We found a charter that could take us out for 2 days and we would spend overnight on a floating hotel on the reef. The large ship where we sleep would relocate to 3 different spectacular dive sites over the course of our travels on the reef.
Stan dropped us off at the “jetty” ( pier) at 6:45AM with all our luggage and snorkel gear. We made our way onto the transfer boat called the experience and motored out to the first dive site which was about 2 hours from the jetty. During the boat ride, we got to know some young people from Holland who have been backpacking through Australia between their university graduation and the commencement of their careers. Emily however, couldn’t take her eyes off this young English dive instructor named Scott. She kept lurking around the boat with my camera trying to secretly take his photo so she could send it to her friend Mecca. Another crush, another day.
We arrived at McKays’s Reef and went snorkelling. It was so amazing and colourful that we lost track of time. We saw every colour of coral imaginable. The reef was teeming with life from large parrot fish to small neons. Christopher , Nicholas and Emily would hold their breath and dive down about 15-20 feet to get closer to some of the larger coral and the hiding fish.
While we were in the water, the crew transferred our baggage onto the floating hotel and prepared an amazing lunch for us. When we swam back to the boat, we had a meeting with the dive master Laura who convinced us that we should all do our advanced Scuba course which would make us extremely experienced divers. The course involved 6 separate dives including a night dive, and a navigation dive where they drop you in the water and give you coordinates like a scavenger hunt. You must find each of the locations using only a compass and your observation . since one of the coordinates is your way back to the boat, it is really important that you get this part right otherwise you would be in trouble and likely lost out in the ocean until they came to retrieve you or you run out of air and have to surface and send out your emergency sausage tube. Once we passed Tracie and I were able to lead our own dive with our kids as followers. This is scary. I still don’t feel that confident as we have only completed 10 dives and now we have the lives of our children in our hands at 40-60 feet below the surface of the water. It is amazing how things become real and how the course kicks in when you are dependent upon the information.
Well we all survived and all members of the family are advanced divers with the exception of Lizzie because she was too young. In Australia you have to be 12 to become certified but she still went diving but with all the instructors who didn’t have a class. She had a great time and was able to do things that the rest of us would not have done. She and one of the instructors went searching for small reef sharks and large fish called Trevallies.
We did so many dives that we were in the water so much we couldn’t get our body temperature to warm up. I think Tracie was going to experience hypothermia as she couldn’t stop shaking and trembling, despite wearing a 6ml bodysuit. Thankfully, they had hot showers which we stayed in for about 15 minutes between dives just to warm up.
You would think that we would sleep well given the amount of physical activity we were doing but no way. It was windy and after we had completed our night dive where the only light you had to see was the flashlight you were carrying and you had to keep track of everyone and you got to see some of the LA RGE nocturnal fish that would appear out of nowhere attracted by the torchlight. The adrenalin rush was still pumping as we got back to the boat. Sleep would not come easy this night and it didn’t. Tracie was worried about our deep dive which was to be our first dive the next day where we were scheduled to go down around 100 feet deep. I would like to sound brave but I can’t, I was feeling a little motion sick from the rocking of the boat. In any event neither one of us slept well.
The next day proved to be equally exciting and exhilarating on the reef. The deep dive proved to be no big deal ( Tracie worried for nothing), and the remainder of the day was full of everything you could imagine on the reef. We even swam with the sharks. Yikes! But in truth they were not that big and they ate fish the size of your hand so I can imagine we looked pretty intimidating to them.
We finished the day by transferring onto another boat that came to pick us up and head back to Cairns. The kids had an opportunity to do one more snorkel on the reef halfway back and my kids never miss an opportunity…..
Great experience, life changing, incredibly memorable.