Dive Course and 4 more days at the Great Barrier Reef

15/7/2015

Cairns Dive course

Yesterday evening I received the letter about the citizenship ceremony in Perth. I'm about to become Australian citizen! The ceremony will take place on 24 August 2015 in Victoria Park. Happy days!

I had a quick look at Google Maps, and from here to Perth its about 6,500 kilometers (if I take the most direct route, which I probably won't do. As I'll be busy diving here for the next 6 days, I'll have about 30 days to complete this lap (I mean amazing trip of a lifetime) around Australia. Not too much time, so I'll have to set some priorities.

It was a nice, but long day at the dive school. We went through the whole morning and afternoon without a break and spent quite a while in the pool too. Was great to repeat some of the exercises. Luke, our instructor from the UK, seems to be quite a decent chap. He used to work in the financial banking sector in London for many years before he decided to quite and instead of living away life in an office, embrace live and adventure. So he moved to Thailand for 2 years to work as dive instructor and about 9 months ago, moved to Cairns to teach diving at the Great Barrier Reef.

Cairns, or most of the east coast, are currently experiencing some extremely cold air that made it all the way north from Antarctica. Temperatures dropped to 10 degrees over night and even during the day it was just about 20 degrees. It'll get a bit warmer tomorrow. We are four students in the open water dive course and all of us and Luke, the instructor, froze our bums off in the pool today, making the hot shower in between and after the sessions a treat. Looking forward to going onto the boat tomorrow, at least the water will be a lot warmer than this pool!

16-20 July 2015

4 Days/3 Nights on the Great Barrier Reef

Early morning rise to meet up at 7am downtown to check in and take a bus to the marina. The Reef Kist, a powerful catamaran, brought us to Fitzroy island first and then continued the extremely bumpy (but funny!) ride to the MV Kangaroo Explorer, my home for the next four days. The Kangaroo Explorer is a liveaboard dive boat with up to 40 passengers. The 4 people shared room was a lot better than expected and had an ensuite bathroom as well. We were 3 people living in the room the first night and I didn't sleep too well with all the movement, light coming in through the window, snoring of the American guy staying on the other top bunk bed and being excited about the all the awesome dives to come over the next 4 days.

Water gushing up

The captain gave the Reef Kist a good washing ;-)

Luke, our instructor from the first two days, joined us on the boat. The Open Water training dives were nice and we even got lucky to see a white trip reef shark on one dive. Unfortunately the shark was in hunting mode and disappeared rather quickly. Olivinzo, a Sri Lankan videographer, joined us for a dive and produced a cool video from us which I just had to buy.

A lot is happening every day!

The schedule on board is quite taxing, especially once you are a certified diver. You are doing 4 dives a day, the first one being just after 6am and the last one is always the night dive. The first night dive was a real adventure for me, I did that one as part of my Advanced Open Water course. Really cool to only have a tiny torch and swim around. We saw some sleeping parrotfish (they create a sort of snot bubble around them to become invisible to predators), some banded boxer shrimp – really colourful in the light of our torches and a huge giant barracuda – at least around 1.5 meters long. In general, bringing your own light is awesome as you don't have all the colour loss that you experience due to the sunlight being fractured by the water. Usually you loose the red colour already when you're about 5m deep, then orange goes, then yellow, green, blue and all the way to ultra violet. Hence the stunning pictures that you see in your National Geographic documentaries, require artificial light, and lots of it!

The bar

Reef at low tide

Sunset from the sun deck

Daniel, Luke, Caroline and me

The reef is very shallow here - great for snorkelers as well

Sunset

Sunrise galore, after the morning dive briefing

Dramatic clouds at sunrise, just minutes before we go for the first dive of the day

I was really lucky, as the group for the open water course was fantastic (Caroline from Sweden, Daniel from Israel, Chris from the UK and me). On board of the Kangaroo Explorer, I was the only student for the Advanced course, so Luke could fully focus on my development.

The most interesting dive was the Peak Performance Buoyancy specialty course. Luke demonstrated and made me do heaps of exercises. The most important and most used 'tool' you have for controlling your buoyancy under water is your lung. Hence we practiced hovering, playing with weights to quickly change your buoyancy to not touch the bottom or rise to the surface, I had to knock over objects with my regulator and my mask while floating only centimeters above the ground, doing a headstand and touching the handle of a divers knife in the ground with my nose (only by controlling my breath) and many other things. Some of the skills we practiced with the fins were quite hard, especially the concept of being able to swim backwards. Awesome session in which we overstayed our time a bit but that brought my skills for all dives to a whole new level. One one dive we saw a juvenile harlequin sweetlip, a really cute young fish which is also the favourite fish of Luke. He was super excited and happy and we were starring at that little fish, floating just above his coral for quite a while. The huge fins compared to the size of the fish make it look like a puppy dog that almost trips over its own ears. As you can see from just this example on the picture, there are many fish that look totally different when they are juvenile compared to when they are adult and also between male and female there can be vast differences. The more you explore the underwater world the more interesting it gets!

The second night dive was great too, there were large Red Bass fish that were following us very closely (even touched and scared some of us) to try and hunt small fish using the light of our torches. Really cool. I felt like watching or to be more precise being in a documentary, silently floating over coral, only few fish around and these large Red Bass eager to stay close to us. We dimmed our light and, just with waving our hands, activated the bio-luminescence of some of the plankton. Stunning when you see these little flashes of light in the darkness, an unbelievable experience.

The second night I had the room for myself and for the third night I was joined by Brian, a Canadian who also joined my buddy group for two dives. Last day at the 6.30 morning dive, I went down to 28.3m with Nathan to make sure I can handle the greater depths well. We got dropped by the little tender boat to the Coral Gardens and had to make our way back to the Kangaroo Explorer following the wall. The non-decompression limits are quite short that far down and because of the higher pressure, you go through your air a lot quicker. Unfortunately there was not much to see down there at this dive site, most coral look just gray, so after a minute we gradually got up to around 18 to 20 meters.

Typical dive site map

Cabin

Ouch - even the band aids and tape didn't really help

We spent our time at Briggs and Moore Reef

Great dive site!

the dive deck

Kermit was on board as well!

Cairns - Fitzroy Island and the reef systems

Harlequin Sweetlips - juvenile

In total I did 13 dives on that trip and the only thing that really could have been better would have been fins that didn't chew my toes up and seeing some more sharks or turtles. Diving at the Great Barrier Reef was amazing and I enjoyed every minute of it! The only challenge was to get into the cold and wet wetsuits! Brrr!

The whole crew of the Kangaroo Explorer looked after us extremely well, made the stay very pleasant and fun. These people are all fully passionate about what they are doing and that shows in everything they do. A big thanks to all of them!

Yes, we had a rough ride back to Cairns!

Distance traveled: many nautical miles