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Pro Dive Liveaboard on the Great Barrier Reef: Day 1

By Bobbi-Jo // 17 May 2010 // Comments: 0 // Related Categories: adventure, Best Backpacker Job, cairns, Scuba, shark

5:30am It’s way too early to be alive much less awake. Like, way too early. It’s a good thing I packed last night or else I’d be living in a world of regret right now. I have 40 minutes to get what I’m not taking on the boat into Benny, get my linens downstairs to check out, and get myself into some sort of presentable state and mood in order to properly interact with the rest of society. Difficult but manageable tasks.

6:10am Pickup time. I kiss Benny goodbye and load into the van to make my way to the Pro Dive dive shop in the center of Cairns. After a few formalities (getting gear that fits, showing my dive card to the powers that be) I’m on my way to the boat. For the next three days I might as well be a fish since I’ll be practically living in the ocean. I’m really excited to go on this trip for a few reasons: the Great Barrier Reef is an obvious draw, getting my Advanced Open Water Certification with the same company I started my dive adventures with in Manly Beach is going to make for nice book-ends to my trip, and the romantic notion of living on a boat for a few days is pretty intoxicating. As long as I don’t, you know, drown, this will be amazing.

9:00am I wouldn't wish this kind of sea sickness on my worst enemy. I curl up in a ball on deck and do my best not to become reacquainted with what I ate for breakfast.

11:00am First dive. We're at Milln Reef at the Petaj dive site and I'm feeling much better. This is spectacular. I decide to tag along with an instructor since I’m still under 10 dives total. To be honest, it’s not as beautiful or lively as some of the other sites I’ve dived in Australia, but the fact that it’s the Great Barrier Reef is pretty cool. With each dive I find myself more and more relaxed, and this is no exception. I’m a little disappointed that we have to come to the surface even though I still had plenty of air left in my tank, but we have 11 dives total and another one in the same location, so the disappointment quickly fades. The fact that there were snacks and tea waiting for us on the boat helped.

12:00pm Ok. I get it. No wet clothes in the saloon. That makes total sense: it’s a nice boat and obviously having people trapsing around in wet suits won’t do anything to keep the place smelling minty fresh. However, I hadn’t even thought about sitting down in my not-so-wet bikini before I was told not to. It’s okay though, it’s a beautiful day, so being relegated to the upper deck wasn’t too bad of a punishment. The ones who got to sit at the big kids table were actually missing out on a very nice view.

2:30pm Back to diving. We decide to head out on our own (no instructor) but with a group of five. Surprisingly, five experienced divers couldn’t put enough wits between them to not get lost. Having been the one to put my wetsuit on inside-out (don't judge me, it's a well established fact that I have no common sense), I felt that I was in no position to intervene, but after we started heading in the exact opposite direction than we needed to be heading, I mustered up all the sign language I know to tell the other Bobbi, “Hey, we’re going to be swimming to China if we keep following these guys. How about we go that way.”

2:45pm Back on the boat. Didn’t see what we were supposed to see, but we had a great dive and I saw a clam that I’m pretty sure was bigger than me, so I’m all smiles.

3:00pm I’ve eaten way too much today. This is totally not appropriate behavior considering I’ll be in a bikini for the next two and a half days.

4:30pm Dive number three. This is the first dive at the Whale Bommie dive site, still at Milln Reef. This is also the first dive that counts towards my Advanced Open Water Certification, which means I’ll be tested on my navigation skills. Never in my life have I realized how short my legs are. A 30m swim that takes other divers 20-30 kick cycles takes me 55. I attribute this to short legs so that I don’t have to come to the terms with the fact that I might be the most inefficient swimmer in the history of the Universe. After doing the reciprocal and square pattern navigation exercise (in which I almost got lost but only almost) we got in a bit of a swim. Apparently there was a big mushroom and a big turtle swimming around that I totally missed. I have to remind myself to look around rather than keeping a watchful eye on my dive instructor. Since I’m still fairly new to diving, I get nervous if I don’t maintain a line of vision with whoever I’m following, but I’m sure I’ll grow out of it.

5:45pm We have a few spare hours to fit in dinner and reading. There’s also a beautiful sunset off of the port side of the ship. It’s a pretty serene moment and I - not to be too introspective - begin to consider myself incredibly lucky. That is, lucky on top of the lucky I usually have felt during this entire Australia trip. I came up snorkeling in both the Caribbean and the Florida Keys, places that most people would kill to have the opportunity to go to much less snorkel. Now I’m honing my diving skills on the Great Barrier Reef. It’s a pretty remarkable thought when you give yourself a few minutes to digest it.

7:00pm Night dive briefing. Arek, the dive supervisor, tells a few shark jokes that would be funny had I not seen the movie Jaws. But, as with any of the other ridiculous things I’ve done since I got to Oz, I didn’t really have a choice on this one, it’s part of my training. We attach little glow sticks - yes, the kind you’d take to a rave - to our air valves and down we go.

7:30pm The second I hit the water it doesn’t feel so scary. You can actually see without the torch, and fish look way cool at night. There’s no moonlight, but the lights from the boat are blinding if you look directly at them, so not only would you have a hard time losing the boat, but you’re never in the pitch dark. We do a quick navigation swim, about 10 kick cycles, to show that we can keep our wits about us with the changed conditions, and go off for a swim. We’re still at Whale Bommie, so we’ve gone through this dive before. At night though, everything is different. I’d be telling a lie if I said at any point during the dive I was completely comfortable, but I adjusted better than expected. I don’t like getting too close to coral, which you really need to do at night, because of years of snorkeling in the Keys. There, you’re given warning after warning about how it kills the reef even if you accidentally brush against something, plus there’s fire coral there, so out of instinct I keep my distance. Even with staying a bit away, it’s an incredible experience. There are points when I’m basically on top of the reef and I don’t notice until I shine my light towards it. I’m pretty stoked about getting to see a dive site so talked about at night.

7:45pm As we start to come up, I start to run into a bit of trouble. I’d had problems equalizing my right ear for the entire dive, but since we were ascending I didn’t think too much of it. As I got up to about 6 meters, I started to experience some serious vertigo. This had never happened to me before, so naturally my body tensed as I felt a bit of panic starting to bubble up. I had to stop myself because, especially being directly under a boat, I knew freaking out wasn’t an option. Unfortunately I did accidentally pop up to the surface too quickly, buzzing by my safety stop, so going back down, trying to equalize, waiting and then properly ascending was arduous and uncomfortable. I got out of the water in pain, so I couldn’t properly soak in the exhilaration of my first night dive. Tomorrow’s will be better.

9:45pm Time for bed. Four dives in one day doesn’t make me as tired as I should be, but I know tomorrow will be an early start, the next day even earlier. I’m someone who can definitely use all the rest she can get, so I get into bed hoping to not have a battle with my brain to get it to shut down. This is by far one of the best things I've done since I've gotten to Australia, so it proves difficult to stop replaying the day over and over in my head. I settle in, happy that I have two more days of doing nothing but diving and getting to know my fellow passengers.

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Many special thanks to VIP Backpackers for being our gracious hosts throughout this trip!