Advertisement
Published: February 2nd 2007
On Tuesday it was time for another flight, this time to Cairns. I had a quiet night at the hotel, and the following morning i had a 6.15am pick up to take me to the dive boat that would be my home for the next 3 days. The boat was scuba pro II which was one of the Pro-Dive boats. We spent 3 days out at sea on the outer reef, and although i was shattered at the end of the 3 days, and nursing a very painful wound on my ankle where the fin had removed several layers of skin, it was a brilliant experience and it is somewhere i would definitely like to return to in the future. Whilst onboad, I obtained my advanced scuba diving qualification, did a dive to 28 m, plus a night dive, and i saw thousands of fish, turtles, an eel, sting rays and white-tip sharks!! And nothing actually freaked me out and i am still alive! I had a lovely diving buddy, a Canadian called Nathan who had done the same number of dives as me, although he had only dived in lakes, not open water, and he was used to diving at
2 degrees, whereas the water on the Great Barrier Reef was a steady 28-29 degrees!! We did quite well and there were only a couple of occasions where we got the navigation a bit wrong and had trouble finding the boat! (do you reckon you can get sat nav that works underwater?!) It was a really good mix of people onboard and we had a group of us who whiled away the evening hours emptying the alcohol fridge whilst playing card games such as 21, Rummy, Poker and more often than not, as we refer to it in our family, "the game with no name" (aka s**thead) On the first night we had a bit of a surprise, a South African couple were on board and he proposed to her in front of everyone on the top deck at sunset, and one of the crew captured it all on camera without her realising what he was up to! We've all swopped emails and they are going to let us know when they name the big day! I shared a room with a nice 23 year old called Nicola from London, who liked to break as many diving rules as possible,
and in Steve, a 41 year old Londoner, she found her match as he also liked to push the limits. They broke rules on every dive and continually went the wrong way around the reefs and as it was they missed out on seeing loads of things! The funniest had to be when she wanted to get his attention for some reason, and she pulled on his regulator with such force that she pulled it out of his mouth completely! (for non-divers, the regulator is your air supply!!) There was also an Australian on board called David, who permamently seemed to have a "tinnie in a stubby holder" whenever we saw him. The ships fridges worked on an honesty system and when we returned to shore on Australia Day, he was absolutely chuffed to bits when they announced he had consumed the most from the "bar fridge" - he was pleased to be doing his bit to keep up the Australian side, as if it was like winning a competition! He was a sweet guy though, and a member of our card school, and he invented a game with rolls of tape and bottles etc (see pictures). There was another
guy, Jack who was a German Jew. His house must be confusing at Christmas, as he has 6 cousins who are also all called Jack, as they are all named after his Grandfather!
They were a good bunch of people, and fingers crossed some of us will see each other again in South Africa if not sooner!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.114s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 12; qc: 50; dbt: 0.0468s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
