The Great Barrier Reef

Oceania » Australia
January 19th 2007

Published: February 5th 2007

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Elnaz and Ashley

The Reef and Calypso

Obviously this is not one of our pictures...the photographer on Calypso gave a complementary CD of pictures to heather.

I'm sure most of you have heard of the Great Barrier Reef at some point or another. However I wasn't aware that it was one of the Seven Wonders of the World until we had arrived in Port Douglas and started making plans to go out and see it. Then, I started wondering what the other wonders where, and that is when I found out that there aren’t just Seven Wonders of the World, but like Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Seven Wonders of the Modern World, Seven Wonders of the Natural World, and the list goes on. Anyway, the GBR is one of the Natural World Wonders because it is the only living thing that can be seen from space, or something like that!

Back to our day there: we left the marina on a very nice yacht called Calypso at around 9:30am and started puttering out to the reef. The trip out is approximately 1hour depending on the boat you’re on and that hour was just spend sun burning on the top deck of the boat.

Once we got out to the reef there was a mad scramble as everyone started rushing to the back of

Calypso

The boat we went out to the reef with...

the boat, putting on the stinger suits and flippers then jumping in the water. It was basically a perfect day for snorkeling, the water was flat, it hadn’t been windy or rainy for a while so it was very clear as well and there was tons for fish everywhere. So many different colors and sizes. I would say it is the most colorful thing in the world, the colors on land do not even compare. Imagine going into a tropical fish store and seeing thousands of fish as well as purple, blue, green, brown, yellow plants in the water. It was amazing. We swam around at this spot for probably about an hour then got back on the boat and motored over to the next dive/snorkel site. It was only about 5 or 10 min. from one site to the next, but the variations in the fish and the coral colors was just unreal. I have no idea why they would be so different while being so close, I guess that is what makes the GBR such a tourist attraction. After another hour of snorkeling we got back on the boat and had lunch (a buffet style cold cuts bar)

On the Sun Deck

The four of us...

and Elnaz decided that being sick on the boat was how she wanted to spend the rest of her day. Was really too bad, she didn’t look very good, and assured me that she didn’t feel very good as well. So after lunch and a presentation about the reef we motored over to our last spot and snorkeled again. The reef was two large cylinders close to each other so you could swim around one, then the other and have deep enough water where divers could actually get deeper than those snorkeling (the other sites were pretty pathetic for divers in that I could dive down and be as deep as they were).

We attempted to capture some of what we saw with our cheep 40 dollar camera, however, the pictures will never turn out like the real thing. There was a photographer on board and because Heather is a agent for a tour booking company she was given a complementary CD with all the pictures from the day, as well as some of his stock photo’s. We’ve included then in this blog, but don’t even think they come close to representing the true reef. There is also some