Great Barrier Reef - It's all about the chopper!

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We had an early start today for our Great Barrier trip and it didn't look good weather wise. It was lashing rain with nothing but dark grey clouds. The two hour trip out to one of the outer parts of the reef known as North Hastings Reef was choppy to say the least. The majority of tourists on board were Asians and they don't take well to rough seas!! There was plenty of people getting sick into paper bags most of the journey. One guy who I think was German was retching and I had to get as far away as possible because the sound of it was nearly making me sick. So I navigated through the Asians with their sick bags and headed downstairs for some tea. Ha ha.

Anyway, we made it to the reef and our dive was scheduled for 12pm so we went snorkelling until then. The current was really strong and the waves were quite big so it was a struggle just moving along the reef. This defintely took away from the snorkelling experience and we were glad that we were actually going to do a dive. The best part of the snorkelling for me was when I spotted a reef shark, about 1.5m long. Not quite jaws but still a shark!!

The dive experience was great. When the dive master heard that I go through the air tank fairly quickly so he got be a bigger one for me which meant we could stay down longer. Aoife had some trouble for the first 10 mins with equalising her ears but she really enjoyed the rest of the dive. I was loving it. Diving through the coral stacks was amazing. It was like being in a huge fish tank with all these colourful fish and coral. There was so many different types of fish. Surprisingly there was no schools of fish. It was more a case of a couple of each variety. There was no sea turtles which was a disappointment. Still, overall the dive was amazing. In the summer I'd say it's even more pristine.

As we got back on the boat we got the call - 'hurry up and follow me because the chopper is waiting'. Aoife said she felt very Jack Bauer! (24 reference) Anyway, a quick change and we were on the small boat to the floating helicopter pad. Savage! The helicopter flight was probably the best part of the day. As you'll see from the pictures attached it was an amazing work of nature to behold. It was beautiful. Seeing the Great Barrier Reef from the air put the scale of it in perspective. It was an epic end to our road trip of around 2150 km from the Gold Coast!

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