Great Barrier Reef (June 23-25)

Having just checked in at the YHA in Cairns I inquired about a trip to the GBR to get to the next level in scuba diving, the advanced open water certification, when I was told that the next course was to commence the next day at 6:20h and that all the courses for the following days were fully booked already. Nice, that gave me 9 hours to do all my laundry, get rid of some more stuff to lighten my backpack and to recover from a 7 hour bus trip. Still, I was really eager to get in the water again and so it was easy to put up with a little less sleep although I knew I had 11 dives in 3 days ahead of me.

Our boat was a purpose built multi million Dollar scuba vessel with about 80 gross tons skippered by a 22-year-old.

Our boat: ScubaPro II

 Our scuba gear for the trip

We had one supervisor, three dive instructors, one chef and 31 divers on board. As mentioned before I attended the advanced course but there were also two open water courses and some people who just went diving for fun. One couple did their first dive at Julian Rocks (where I did my Open Water Course) the year I was born and have logged more than 500 dives ever since.

In my course there was just five “students” (3 Americans and my buddy Peter, a Korean bloke from Toronto) and Gary our Kiwi-instructor who was a good teacher and also taught us way more than what was needed to complete the course.

The advanced course consists of 5 adventure dives as they call it. Those are deep diving, night diving, underwater navigation and then you can elect the remaining two dives. Since only underwater photography and underwater naturalist (and before you feel obliged to leave a “funny” comment, no, you don’t dive naked that would be a “naturist”) was offered as your elective dives you couldn’t really choose. Honestly, I still don’t know what I learnt in underwater naturalist as we had to specify 5 corals, 5 fish and 5 clamy-lobstery creatures (forgot the word they used for that).

Photography was really interesting and also quite difficult as you need to have established neutral buoyancy before taking the picture. You basically cant take a picture of things that are below you because of the missing light and if you are negatively buoyant (means sinking to the ground) you might damage the corals beneath you so it was quite tricky because you take almost only macro pics. The only way I could do it was by regulating your buoyancy with the amount of air you hold in your lungs. But then again that damn clownfish just wouldnt come out of the anemone when you were tickle breathing (remember, you never hold your breath in scuba diving).

 One of my dive mates taking a pic of that giant clam

Everyone was given his own equipment for the duration of the trip and so you really got used to your gear. My buddy was not too familiar with the compass and so it was up to me to find back to the boat. Good thing, though. I was to lead.

My first night dive was quite tricky as the swell picked up and stirred the water deteriorating (everybody knows the verb “to improve” but only few know the antonym. So know you have it and you might wanna remember it) the vis to about 3-4 meters. It also was pretty tough taking your flippers off in that swell and getting back on board with that heavy gear on your back. Later our instructor said this had been as tough as a night dive can get and so I was pleased to get the proper experience right from the start.

Our second night dive was much more relaxed as the vis improved to 15 meters and I choose not to take the guided dive but to find my own way around that black liquid. In the beginning it was quite scary when you are supposed to jump into the water and you stand on that boat looking at the dark water seeing sharks circling the boat.

The boat, what is thrown overboard and its light attract a lot of fish and so the biggest fish (including one massive wally, the nickname for a napoleon wrass) I have seen on this trip where right underneath the boat. At night time the nocturnal sharks get attracted by the fish under the vessel and start to circle the boat.

biggest fish were right underneath the vessel

 Barracuda

Our task in this second night dive was to find Brian a giant turtle that usually sleeps in the same places. Having not seen him in the first place where he should have been I looked for him a bit further off and had just spotted him below my position when my buddy came up to me asking me how much air I had left in the tank. I answered “fuck you” (big shout out to Peter, he knows what is meant) and realized he had not seen Brian yet. I didn’t want him to freak out and so I did the one-handed sign for turtle and pointed down. Peter was not familiar with that sign, looked down and literally freaked out going “WTF” as he was merely hovering 1 meter above that giant turtle. It was funny as hell.

After he calmed down we had a look at Brian and he was really massive. It is hard to describe how big he is. Taking into consideration that everything appears 1/3 closer and ¼ bigger under water I would say his shell is at least one by one meter. Adding the head, limbs and tail I would guess he is 1.5m x 1.5m and so you are looking at 2.25 square meters of turtle from a distance of 1-2 meters. Wicked!!!!!

not Brian but always a nice sight

The next morning we got kicked out of bed at 5:45h to get into the water for this day’s first dive at 6:15h. The dive site was called “corals garden” and it will be hard for the red sea or the Maldives to top that. I know I have not dived in that many different locations yet but I can hardly believe there is a place on earth has better corals. If you look at the establishing shots in the movie finding Nemo you can see what I have seen. This bio diversity of corals, fish, and sponges is just mind-blowing and really hard to describe. Especially those table corals make it look just like the movie with the light shimmering thru the waves. We have decided not to go below 8 meters to enjoy the reef for as long as we possibly could.

 lots of fish and narrow swim-thrus

I still don’t know if the black and white Nemo at the Whitsundays was in fact a true clownfish but as I have seen one now at the GBR that question became irrelevant. Also I can tick:

Dori, a surgeon fish, barracuda, wrass, trigger fish, trumpet fish, rays, lizard fish, butterfly fish, bat fish, snappers, all kinds of different clown fish, black tip reef shark and many more that I don’t know or forgot the name of.

Dori, a surgeonfish

I would also like to mention the great briefings we got from Oscar, our dive supervisor. He must have dived these sites many times in order to demonstrate such a good knowledge of the area. He knows every bommy, every sandy pat, all the depth levels, all the bearings from various points and every swim thru there is. Those briefings were actually the reason I felt comfortable doing the second night dive unguided. I still can see Peter’s face when I convinced him to go unguided and he reluctantly agreed eventually. The thanked me later for it later cuz we got to see Brian and the guided guys didn’t.

This was definitely the best experience in Australia so far and way better than Fraser, sailing in Brisbane or the Whitsundays