Random activities of my everyday life in Port Douglas

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I haven't posted in a couple of weeks, so here it goes: a lot of the things I've done are pretty much the same rutine I've had for almost two months (concerning work), but combined with some other activities. One of the reasons I waited to post, was because I needed to get photos that other people had taken so I could add them to this post.



Saturday 7th of July I had the day off and really didn't do much that day. The weather wasn't really good, so I just stayed home and slept until late.



Then, I worked 8 days in a row (from Sunday 8th to Sunday 15th). All days were really different, with some of them being very relaxed, with only a few divers and others with up to 24 divers in a day. Also, the weather was very changing: we went from having winds of 30 knots and pretty rough sea, to having clear skies with almost no wind and flat sea. Of course, some days were better than others.

Also, some days I had to take people doing introductory dives and other days, take certified divers. We've also been spotting a lot of whales in the area. They are usually seen starting from this time of year; mostly minke whales (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minke_whale) and humpback whales (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpback_whale). Whenever we have whales close to the boat, the boat has to stop and wait until the whales go away. We've seen some really nice whales breaching the surface - an amazing sight and also, a few lucky snorkelers have been able to be very close to minke whales a few times.



On Monday we had Florence's (Flo's) birthday. She's a French girl who works in Calypso. She wasn't very keen in celebrating it, but we pushed and she agreed to go out to an Italian restaurant. After work that day, we got together at her house at about 7pm (there was Reneé, Lizzy, Jessie, Bruce, Giselle and I) and we had a few drinks there before heading off. At around 8:30 we walked to a restaurant calle Bucci and we had to wait for about 30 minutes to get in, so in the meantime we went to have a beer at a restaurant called "Rattle n' Hum". After the beer we went back and had a really nice evening. The food was really good (although I could've done with bigger portions) and we had a great time. We went back home at around 11:30 that night.



I can't remember anything too exciting happening Tuesday and Wednesday, so I'll skip straight to Thursday: after work, a few people from Calypso and myself (pretty much the same ones I usually go out with), went to Rattle n' Hum because they have "10 dollar stake night" on Thursdays (for locals only), which is a T-Bone with chips and a salad. We stayed there having a few beers and playing pool until about 11pm. Another good day.



Friday at work, in the morning, I was taking the name of the passengers as they were boarding. At some point, I heard someone say "Nicolás", with a very Chilean accent. It turned out, it was a Chilean couple with a baby (Nicolás Birrell and Magdalena Del Solar) with their baby, Martín. They're living in Sydney and were taking a few days of vacations. Both of them were doing an introductory dive and I was the dive instructor on board that day. There wasn't anyone else doing introductory dives, so I had only them as students that day. The day went by really well and I got to take both of them diving (in different dive sites). I also got to talk with them on the way back (always nice to speak with fellow Chileans) and as is a lot of times the case for Chileans, we knew people in common.

That evening, I invited some people over to the house to have a drink: Lochie and his girlfriend Peta (he worked with us in Calypso for a few days), Bruce, Giselle, Melina, Anthony, Jessie and her boyfriend Tom, who's been in Port Douglas for a few days. Very chilled and we didn't really stay up until too late.



On Saturday, I was in charge of taking out the certified divers and that day I had 3 Israeli divers; marine biologists who had assisted a conference in Australia. It turned out, one of them (Esti) had lived in the same street as I did in Israel when she was a kid (Wingate Street in Herliya Pituach).

The best dive we did that day was in a site called Sno. The visibility was amazing: about 30 meters at least. That site is basically an underwater hill surrounded by blue water and on the top, there are really nice plate corals sitting at about 3 - 4 meters from the surface full of tropical fish. I really wanted to see a whale, so kept looking towards the blue water, but without any luck.

That same day, people on the boat spotted minke whales swimming right underneath the boat and afterwards we spotted humpbacks breaching when we were on the way back o Port Douglas, as well as a few dolphins.

That afternoon, while we were cleaning the boat (I was hosing it), a thought came to mind: I remembered when people asked me what I was actually considering on doing once I got to Australia on my "Work and Holiday" visa. I responded that whatever job I could get - scrubbing dishes, waiting in restaurants, maybe try and get a job in diving or work in a marina cleaning boats, etc. I realized then, that I was actually doing most of that stuff in the same job: diving, cleaning the boat, sometimes working as a host (serving food and coffee, washing dishes, etc). Funny how things turned out.



Last Sunday was a very hectic day - I didn't really enjoy it at all, mostly because of the large amount of divers we had that day, plus people from 3 dive schools which made it really unpleasant. The highlight of the day though, was that I saw a school of about 15 humphead parrotfish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphead_Parrotfish) feeding in a divesite called "Blue Buoy". It's an amazing sight seeing the 1.2 meter fish feeding in a group. Also, in a site called "Two Tone" I took two unexperienced divers to a spot where I usually see sharks. I wasn't dissapointed: we saw 3 gray reef sharks swimming together (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_reef_shark); I still very much enjoy that magnificent sight. Besides those two great events, the rest of the day was non-stop and got back home just wanting to get some sleep.

I'm doing my first Open Water course as a free lance instructor and my student is one of my flaymates, Melina. That evening, I had Melina take her Open Water "Quick Quiz" (the final exam) and also explain a few things she wasn't very sure about. In two days I had to take her to do the Open Water dives.



After 8 days of consecutive work, having Monday day off was a welcome change. I slept until late and in the afternoon went to the supermarket to buy stuff for myself and also to help Melina get a few things for the birthday party she was preparing for Anthony that night (her husband).

At around 7pm we headed down to 4 Mile Beach where there's a public barbeque. About 15 - 20 people came to Anthony's birthday and I was requested to do the barbeque (seems like Chilean barbeque is getting popular). It was good fun, we all wore birthday hats, sang happy birthday, had good food and cake and then ended in the beach having the usual bonfire. I went to sleep at around 1am, but a few stayed there to about 3am.



Tuesday was a very relaxed day at work. We only had about 1/3 of the amount of passengers we've been getting lately, plus there were only a few divers. I did the introductory dives and only had 2 divers with me that day.

In the evening, Giselle and Bruce invited me to their house to watch a documentary called "Shark Water", about the exploitation of sharks (http://www.sharkwater.com/). It has some really amazing footage and shows a lot of usually unknown facts about sharks. While we watched the movie we had a meat sandwich with fried egg, onions and mushroom for dinner (something light).



On Wednesday, the day at work was pretty good; I took out the certified divers and had a few good dives, with Sno being the best one again (really good visibility and amazing colors of corals near the surface).

At night, I didn't do much, just watched a couple of movies and also went over through some things with Melina because I was taking her out on Calypso the next day to do the ocean dives and finish her Open Water (OW) course.



Thursday was an amazing day. I had asked for the day off in order to finish Melina's OW course. We went to the marina at around 7:30am and went to leave our things in the boat. While the crew was setting everything up, we went to get a coffee in a wine bar at the marina (Marina View). There, we went over the skills she needed to do during the day. The OW course consists of a pool session (which we had done already) and 4 dives in the ocean. Because she had done an intriductory dive before, that already counted as a 1st dive, so I only needed to do 3 dives with her that day. At around 8:30 we boarded Calypso and got the dive gears ready. It took about 1 and a half hours to get to the first site (Blue Buoy). We jumped in the water, did a few skills at the surface and then went down and did the rest of the skills of the first dive underwater. Then, we had some time to swim around, saw some clownfish and then went back to the boat.

We had some time to get a coffee before getting ready to jump in the water in the second site (Sno). Same thing as before, did some skills at the surface and right before I was going to start doing the underwater skills, the skipper (Tony) calls me from the boat and told me there were 4 minke whales very close to where I was. Melina and I started swimming in the surface towards the directions of where the whales were and surely enough, after a short while we saw a minke whale about 10 meters from where we were and about 2 meters from the surface. It was the first time I had ever seen a whale while being in the water and it was spectacular, definitely the highlight of the day. After that, we went underwater, did a few skills and then went to have a look around at the dive site.

The thrid and final dive site was "Wedge". This one in particular is really nice, with an amazing landscape. We had already finished all the skills we needed to do, so this was a "fun dive". We had a "drop off" (they took us out in the dinghy) along with Giselle and 2 divers she was taking. We were dropped in an open area in whicch the bottom sits at around 20 meters. We started going down (the visibility was really good: about 25 - 30 meters) and the continued slowly towards the direction of the mooring line to which the bote was tied to. Giselle and I saw a gray reef shar swimming at maybe 10 - 15 meters from where we were (it then lost interest and swam away). The rest of the dive was just progressing slowly toward the boat, looking at the corals, landscape and fish. We saw a giant school of humphead parrotfish again, right before getting back to the boat. After we got back in the boat, Melina completed all the things shee needed to do to become a certified and then all we needed to do was finish logging the dives.

After arriving in Port Douglas, we went to the marina to have a drink and then, after the crew in Calypso finished cleaning the boat, we joined them for a last beer.

When we got back home, I logged in the PADI website and finished processing Melina's card (this I hadn't done before, so it was good to know how the system works). Then dinner, played a couple games of cards and then off to bed.

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Comments

[valentina]

que chistoso que te pongan "Dan"