Pro Dive Liveaboard on the Great Barrier Reef: Day 2

By Bobbi-Jo // 18 May 2010 // Comments: 0 // Related Categories: adventure, Best Backpacker Job, cairns, Scuba

3:22am WHY am I awake. Why. I scream at myself for a minute before I drift back to sleep, a process made a little bit easier than usual by the gentle rocking of the boat.

6:30am Our wake up time is 6:45, but there’s already a bit of a morning party going on right outside my door. I roll out of bed wanting to catch a picture of the sunrise so I do my best to look borderline presentable and head out. I sneak in the sunrise and even manage a pleasant chat and a cup of coffee before our first dive briefing of the day.

7:30am This is the third dive in the Advanced series. We’re still at Whale Bommie, but instead of going off with a buddy I’m doing a deep dive with Kane, my instructor, and the three other people getting their Advanced Certification on this trip. We get our tanks topped up a bit more than the others since we’ll be going deeper than the rest and I’m grateful. For some reason I’ve been sucking through air a lot faster than usual. When we get to 19.2 meters, I realize this is farther than I would have been able to dive a week ago. At 21.2 meters down I start to get cold, but a stingray swims by that quickly distracts me. Almost as if the ocean knew that I had just passed what was previously a limit, a huge white fish swims past. I’ll call Powder because I can’t be bothered to go look it up in The Book of Fish, but it took all of me not to leave my group to give it a chase. It swims along with us for a while before eventually reaching a school of Powders, this is around the same time we reach 26 meters - our max depth. We settle to the bottom for a demonstration. Kane has brought a few toys down with him to demonstrate color changes at depth as well as the effects of pressure. He didn’t need to use the color chart to show the transformation red goes through that far down (it appears almost brown) because his second demonstration has him blowing air into a Coca Cola bottle. Anyone would recognize that iconic branding and know immediately that the red was no longer red. On the swim back I followed another Powder for a while, but decided to move along when it stopped and looked right at me. Death by fish is not exactly how I want to go out. In all, we were under for about 30 minutes and all of a sudden a whole new world of diving was opened up to me.

8:30am After I darted out of the water and jotted down my thoughts on the dive - before all of the words could spill out of my head - it was time for breakfast. I’m grateful to the other Bobbi for making sure she (we) were first in line. No lining up on the stairs for us! What happens next is, again, not bikini behavior. I’m stuffed and ready to relax before our next dive. We have a 25 minute journey to the next site so I’m keen for some reading, sunbathing and catching up with the other divers.

11:00am Dive #2 for the day. We’ve moved over to Flynn Reef and are at The Tennis Courts dive site. Other Bobbi astutely points out that it should be called The Guitar on account of the fact that there’s a giant sand formation in the shape of, you guessed it, a guitar. History books, take note. The fabulous Bobbi Lee Hitchon brought you that gem. We hop in the water, buddied up. This is my first dive with only one other person that isn’t an instructor or dive master. We had so much more fun being just the two of us than diving in bigger groups. It’s a beautiful dive site, and fresh off the boat we headed down to about 18 meters and swam along the reef wall. The colors, fish and coral are breathtaking. I feel like I keep saying that, but it keeps being true. About three quarters of the way through our dive I saw a group of people getting photographed with a sign that read GREAT BARRIER REEF. Being a bit of a jerk, I saw a perfect opportunity to photo bomb, but we’ve already gone over the fact that I’m a slow swimmer so I didn’t quite make it. The weird part about it was that the photographer immediately swam towards me and had me pose a few times for her. It’s not every day you’re swimming through the Great Barrier Reef and take a pause for a photoshoot, but nothing in my life has ever been normal so I just went with it. We were down for about 45 minutes and came up out of the water all smiles. And a little more famous.

12:00pm Mmmmm. Lunch.

12:45pm Lots of prepping going on. I’m done with the compulsory dives for my Advanced Certification, so now I’m hearing about my two electives. I’m choosing Underwater Photography and Naturalist Dives, the same as probably 99.9% of Advanced students. Both make me nervous for different reasons. To get good underwater shots you have to get pretty close to whatever you’re taking a picture of. I believe we’ve already spoken about how I don’t like to get too close to things underwater. But, I’m willing to get over that for the sake of getting some good shots. The Naturalist dive doesn’t so much make me nervous as much as, well, I’m not very good at identifying animals. Or plants. Or anything really. On my last rainforest walk the guide pointed out a plant that will sting you and make your bowels hurt for days just by brushing against it. Five minutes after she pointed it out I forgot what it looked like and was petrified of brushing against anything for the remaining two hours of the hike. So, you know...it might be difficult.

1:30pm Ok, now I’m excited. Just had a camera briefing and I can’t wait to get underwater and test out some of the things we learned. The fact that I have to do this dive dovetails nicely with the fact that I want to. I’m a little sad that I didn’t rent a camera from Cairns Digital for the trip. I would have paid $85 for the full three days (eleven dives) versus the $35 I’ll pay for just the one dive. But just the same, I like looking around so I wouldn’t want to be distracted by trying to get the perfect shot during every one of my dives.

3:00pm Getting ready to get into the water. We’re diving Gordon’s Mooring, a part of Flynn Reef. This is the dive we’re told to be camera ready for, and there’s a big reason. Turtles, sharks, a million types of coral and Nemo’s entire family surround you for the entire dive. Arek, the dive supervisor, seems to fancy underwater photography as much as I fancy bacon, which is to say a lot, takes us under his wing for the dive. I figure it’s a good idea to follow him because he’ll probably know all of the good spots and he’s been diving long enough to know to avoid the crowds. It’s a seriously fun dive, with two or three swim-throughs that were a bit scary for me because I was afraid of touching anything but also unbelievably beautiful. It was like swimming through an aquarium. Aside from getting a little squeamish as I tried to get up close to some coral for a macro shot, that was the best dive I’ve ever had.

5:16pm I look up from admiring the pictures that I took of Nemo to find the other Bobbi and one of the other divers doing yoga on the deck. No further comment.

7:10pm I’m not going on this night dive. I can use the excuse that I’m not feeling well, and I’m not - but I’m more nervous than ill. Getting disoriented on the ascent last night wasn’t a ton of fun, and since I’d already proven to myself that I can dive at night, I didn’t really feel the need to prove it again. I took some time to play with the settings on my camera and take pictures of the other divers as they got ready to go in. While they’re in the water, I busy myself with talking to a group of friends up from Melbourne on one of many dive trips that they take per year. I wouldn’t be surprised if these guys had known each other for 20 years, you can tell they’re practically family. They’re a colorful bunch and it was fun watching them throw back whiskey and crack totally inappropriate jokes. I was glad that they didn’t censor themselves because there was a “lady” present.  Whether they know it now or not, I am definitely taking them up on their offer to go diving with them in Melbourne.

8:30pm I’m not sure how it happens, but I’m roped in to playing something called the Snorkel Game. It’s ridiculous, and I can’t decide whether the pictures need to be burned or not. But it was fun, and it brought the passengers and crew together for some silly bonding time.

9:30pm The first dive tomorrow is at 6:30am, which means that if I’m not asleep 10 minutes ago, there is no hope that I’ll be remotely pleasant in the morning. Goodnight, Moon.

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Many special thanks to Pro Dive Cairns for taking us out to the reef and showing us such a great time and to VIP Backpackers for being our gracious hosts throughout this trip!