Sunday, February 2, 2002

The Great Barrier Reef

The QuickSmart transfer bus picked us up at the hotel at 6:45am, then it was about an hour drive up to Port Douglas where we checked in with QuickSilver Cruises. Our boat was a 24 meter catamaran with an air-conditioned lower deck. The trip out to Agincourt Reef was about an hour and a half.

On the way our dive instructor Andy gave us an introductory lesson in the workings of our scuba gear. Rick had been diving a few years earlier in Cancun, but wanted to see Randy's first dive, so we were both doing the introductory dive. Before arrival at our first dive stop, Randy checked the underwater housing and flash for one of the digital cameras. Several of the other passengers were very curious about it.

Our first stop was 'Nursery Bommie'. We strapped on our air tanks, and after a quick safety check at the surface, we descended to 30 feet. Then we swam around a large column of coral, with all kinds of brightly colored fish swimming around. The variety was amazing. Andy showed us several sea creatures, including one really tiny starfish that he let us hold in our hands. We stayed down about half an hour, then returned to the surface. Randy was really excited to have completed his first dive! We had both decided that we definitely wanted to do both of the remaining dives rather than snorkel.

Swimming through an underwater tunnel.

The side of a Bommie.

This skate is a relative of the shark.

In places the fish were thick!

The boat moved to a second location named 'The Wreck'. We put our gear back on and went back down to the sea floor. At this site we saw a large anchor from a ship which sank near here. After about 20 minutes, we saw the one thing Rick had been waiting to see since last year in the British Virgin Islands, a shark! It was a small one, about 4 feet long, and it didn't seem to want anything to do with us (fortunately), but at least we had seen one!

The two of us holding onto an old anchor.

Lots of big colorful fish.

Can you make out what it is? Rick could! It's a small white tipped reef shark that was about 15 feet from us.

It's not just the fish that are colorful.

When we returned to the boat, lunch was waiting. It was quite good, and well timed, since we were both starving. After lunch the boat moved once more, this time to 'Barracuda Bommie'. This was another large column of coral, with thousands of fish of all sizes around it. After figuring out that the camera needed to be turned on at the surface (at depth the enclosure compresses enough to prevent the lens from popping out completely), we were able to take about 100 pictures of the fish and coral on the second and third dives.

The trip back to Port Douglas took about an hour and a half. During that time we watched some of the video footage that the videographer had shot of us underwater. We decided to get a CD-ROM of it as a souvenir.

Back in Port Douglas, we decided to take the Quicksilver catamaran back to Cairns, rather than sit on another bus. The catamaran is very big and fast (50 meters long, 29 knots cruising speed). It took about an hour and a half to get back, and we were able to walk around the boat and spend some time relaxing inside along the way. It dropped us off just 2 blocks from the hotel, so it was a quick walk back.

After we had showered we went downstairs to the hotel bar and had a drink, and then had dinner in the restaurant just off the lobby. Back in the room we were both very worn out and fell asleep quickly. Fortunately we can sleep in tomorrow morning, as we're being picked up at 8am.