Tuesday, November 29th
Today was our great barrier reef scuba day! We got up bright and early for the hour trip to Port Douglas to meet up with the dive boat. The boat we went out on was a catamaran and served for both SCUBA divers and snorkelers. There were 8 certified divers and close to 8 more getting their certification, plus 20-30 snorkelers on the boat. It was very well organized and well run, though, which we were pleased to see.
When we left the marina, we headed out to the Outer Reef, which took close to an hour and a half. The weather was warm and we spent most of the time out on the upper deck enjoying the nice breeze and beautiful views. Once we got to our first dive site, we got our gear on and jumped off the boat into the warm, clear blue water! The process was the same for all 3 dives, the only change being the depth of the dives, with the first being the deepest and the last the most shallow. The reef itself is quite shallow and our deepest dive was only about 60 feet. The terminology of the diving and equipment was a bit different for us since Australia is on the metric system. We are used to measuring the amount of air we have in our tanks in psi (pounds per square inch) and they measure it in "bar," with 3,000 psi equaling 200 bar. Of course the depths are measured in meters, so we had to keep that in mind when we were told how deep we would be diving during each dive.
On our dives, we saw the diversity of the coral and sea life, and were impressed with how vibrant the colors were. We did see some sharks, but they were harmless as they were only black tipped reef sharks. The variety of fish was quite stunning and it was stunning to see how many species were there. We normally do not touch any fish, coral or sea life we see while we are diving, but our dive master did say here were a few animals we would be able to touch once he picked them up and handed them to us. One of these was the pineapple sea cucumber, which sort of reminded me of a caterpillar in its look. It was quite sticky on the bottom and felt a bit like rubber on the top. The other thing we got to hold was a purple starfish, which was actually very beautiful. Tim took videos on his go-pro of the dives so he will likely upload that to YouTube once he has edited it so I'll put a link in a blog post to that.
Overall, our day at the reef was great and we were really thankful to have such a beautiful day for such a wonderful, perhaps once in a lifetime, opportunity! Once we arrived back into the marina at Port Douglas, it was close to 5 in the evening but we walked a bit around town and stopped to share a pineapple-mango sorbet, which was perfect on a hot afternoon! We headed back to the condo and made dinner before crashing in bed after a very long and fun day! Photos and video to come!
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