Cairns Liveaboard Dive Trip

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Cairns - 14/02/07-20/02/07

Just before we get into our trip to Cairns, there’s something I need to mention about Oz that’s been bugging me since we got here and I keep forgetting. Australia doesn’t have 1 or 2 cent coins in circulation. Nothing particularly strange or annoying with that I hear you say, but it is when they keep pricing everything as $4.27 or $16.99. You get to the checkout and you either have to round up or down. How daft is that ??

Anyway, as mentioned in an earlier instalment, part of my 30th birthday present was to go diving for three days on the Great Barrier Reef and do our Advanced Open Water Scuba certificate. We’ve been looking forward to this part of our trip basically since Lee booked it and we did all our saving up like we planned and were raring to go.

Now I don’t think Lee or I could really be called complacent, but we hadn’t even considered anything going wrong, despite previous parts of our journey suggesting otherwise. We were just looking forward to getting back out in the water and seeing some sharks and turtles again. I wasn’t even concerned about flying for about the first time in my life.

We decided that on the Tuesday evening before we flew to Cairns that we would meet Tracey in town for a couple of drinks and then we’d pop off home and get our stuff ready for our early rise (taxi was at 05.45). To cut a long story short, we got back to the house at 05.00 and basically had to scramble around the house just throwing anything into a bag to get ready. It was proper panic time and we didn’t really have a clue what we were packing and what we weren’t, so tempers were a little frayed shall we say, tempers which were made even more frayed when Lee smashed her toe into the concrete steps at the front of the house. We eventually made it to the train to the airport with minutes to spare and sat in silence for the rest of the journey, trying not to fall asleep.

Now to those of us familiar with little ol’ Edinburgh airport, it’s an easy place to get to and to get around, whether you are flying to New England or just to England, you turn up at the airport and you get on your plane. Easy as !! The voice on the train announces that we are now stopping at Brisbane Airport so off we pop and stagger into the terminal. It’s at this point that we realise that we haven’t packed our passports !! We collared one of the airport staff and explained what we had done and asked him if it would be ok to use our Diving Cards as photo ID as that was all we had. The guys asks us where we are flying to and we told him Cairns and he says “yeah, diving cards will be fine but you’re in the International Terminal and you need domestic mate, and your plane leaves in 35 minutes”. Oh boy !! Now to get to the Domestic Terminal, it’s actually a $10 cab ride but we get the only cabbie in Brisbane who is not willing to take us because she has been waiting for ages in the queue to get a decent fare into the city, so we offer to pay her $15 instead and she tells us to get in the cab and basically gives us ear-ache all the way to Domestic Departures, it really improved our mood I can tell you that right now. We managed to get to our check-in with about 5 minutes before it closed and about 3 minutes before that cabbie was going to have to find her fare with a mirror and some rubber gloves !!

We both slept the entire flight to Cairns, it was great.

Brisbane is a hot place to live, it’s pretty humid as well, but when you get off the plane in Cairns, you feel about 10 pounds heavier instantly because of the amount of water in the air. We basically needed a shower to dry off. The hostel we were staying at in Cairns run a free pick-up service which was a nice touch so about 5 minutes after we landed, we were on a bus to the Hostel (The Serpent Hostel it’s called, highly recommend it by the way). We were only staying at the hostel for one night at first so we got to our room and put everything we’d needed for the diving trip in the one bag so that we could leave our other bag at the hostel until we got back. Turns out that for someone who was going diving, I saw fit not to pack any swimming gear !! Other than that, we had done pretty well considering the state we were in while we were packing the bags.

We took one of the free buses from the hostel into town to check the place out and Cairns is almost like a purpose built backpackers town. All the shops are selling surfing and diving gear, every second place is an internet shop/travel agent and there are hostels and pubs all over the place. Any locals that actually live there, and this was the first place that we have stayed in that had a noticeably larger Aboriginal population, seem to walk about looking at the invasion of pale blue British people and wondering what’s going on in their town.

We did a bit of shopping for some new boardies (that’s swimming shorts to you folks back home) for me and some new shoes for Lee if we needed to go out at all. Then it was off to the dive shop in town to get our diving gear sorted out so that they didn’t have to faff around at 6 the next morning. Once that had all been sorted out, it was back to the hostel to get ourselves some food and a quick drink and then it was off to bed early.

We were up at about 05.30 the next day to catch te bus that was picking us up at the hostel to take us to the dive shop so you can imagine that we were in really high spirits......anyway, another bout of non-exostant packing saw us rushing again to be ready in time and we managed to get down to the reception just as the last people were getting on the bus so as usual were were cutting it a bit fine. We were kind of wishing that we'd had our diving gear on in the hostel room 'cos it was absolutley chucking it down, proper deluge rain and it didn't look like letting up either. Consequently, when we got out the bus at the dive shop Lee was getting out carrying some bags and we had to step out into the street which was about 3 inches deep in water running down the street. I managed to turn round just as Lee flip flop came off her foot and took off down the gutter. Not on eperson moved to get it and this meant that after it had gone about 30 feet, it disappeared down the drain leaving Lee with one leg shorter than the other and the look of a drowned rat about her. Stop laughing you lot !! A quick trip to the 24 hour store sorted her out a realy fetching pair of bright pink flip flops and were were ready to go.

We'd made it to our boat. ScubaProII it was called and a foin seeeeee-faring beauty she was too (best Captain Haddock voice on for that one). It comfortably holds 32 divers and a crew of 5. Everyone was gathered in the dining area for our introduction from Tanya our Dive Co-ordinator, one-woman entertainment package and a legend in her own head. Nah, she was alright actually. Our skipper for the trip handed out safety numbers to everyone, Lee and I being handed 1 nd 2 respectively (easy to remember) and this meant that every day before we moved site, the captian would go round and make sure everyone was on board, to avoid any embarassing "We left your wee boy in the ocean, Mrs Dove, sorry" type moments.

There were a good mix of people and experiances on board which was cool so everyone had a story to tell and those that hadn't dived just listened to the others so it was easy to get chatting to folk pretty much from the off. There was Team Denmark, Lars and Dennis who were travelling before doing thier national service, Team Scotland were James and Davie from Fraserborough, pair of nutters, that's all I can say, Team USA were Karen and Keil who were diving nuts and basically lived underwater from what we can tell and there was also Team Extreme, two Aussie brothers who seemed like the kind of work-hard-play-hard kind of guys whwo were really experienced and only wanted to push themselves to deeper and deeper water. They stepped off the boat looking like the SAS every day with knives and all kinds of gubbins strapped to themselves. A walking hormone from Liverpool called Toric was also there, he'd picked up a wee Swedish lassie while they were doing their pool training and managed to ditch her by the time we'd had the after dive party on the Saturday. Oh aye, there were also Team Germany, but they didn't speak to anyone other than themselves


Our first dive was a guided dive from Tanya on Milin Reef and she took us down and showed us around, pointing at all kinds of stuff but none of the holy grail of diving, turtles, rays and sharks. Truth be told, until the end of the course, we didn't actually see very much on our first 4 or 5 dives. Our second dive however was memorable for other reasons. Basically, everyone who had passed their open water course previously (ie us) were sent out on our own. Lee and I had never been diving on our own before so it was a wee bit daunting as we had a veeeeeeery basic grasp of underwater navigation courtesy of our instructor in the Perhentians ("this is a compass, point it North and swim in that direction for 20 kicks. Good, now you can use a compass). Before every dive we are given a dive briefing, and they tell us what bearing we are to swin on, how to get back and what we'll see down there. So off we went, swimming away to ourselves and giving the ok sign every half second to each other and we were quite happy with ourselves until we realised we couldn't see any of the things that had been mentioned in the dive briefing. We couldn't see anyone either. We decided to pop to the surface after about 17 minutes down there and when we got up we were about 100 metres away from where we should have been.

Now before we had got into the water, Lee had had problems getting her BCD to inflate (it's basically the lifejacket that connects to your air supply and controls your buoancy). The connecter hose to her tank was not working properly and when we told our intructor, she basically decided that Leew as doing it wrong and connected it for her and she didn't seem too happy about this. Anyway, we bob up to the surface and Lee's BCD would not inflate. You guessed, the connector hose wasn't on right which meant that LKee had manually inflate her BCD which is knackering as you have to kick up the way to take a breath and then go under water while you blow into the BCD. A quick signal to the boat and they launched the dinghy to come and get us and drag us back to the boat. Not one of our best dives.

As luck (or irony) would have it, our third dive was a navigational dive with Oscar, a big Kiwi instructor who was nice as nice could be. It was nice to be able to go down and properly use a compass and it set up a lot better for hte rest of the trip. A few exercises were carried out with the compass and we felt much better. And a wee surprise that our Oscar had in store for us while we were down there was that he liked to go diving with an empty Coke bottle and squeeze it to make vibrations in the water to attract sharks. Funny guy that Oscar, always said that. No sharks were seen though.

The lasy dive of the day was our night dive. And I don't mean an atmospheric just-as-the-sun-goes-down dive. I mean a NIGHT dive, pitch dark night dive. The only visible light was the massive underwater lamps under the boat. There is no feeling like the one when you get into the water at night and start descending. You hold onto the mooring line from the boat and drag yourself down. You can see nothing below you and nothing above you once you get to about 10 metres, your orientation is all over the place and the only things you can see are the lights from your torch and the flourescent glo-sticks attached to the tanks of the other divers. Once you get to the bottom though, it's wicked, loads of things that are sleeping during the day come out to play and the entire place changes. It's probably the closest you can come to being in space that you can get on earth. Night dives are a hoot.

The next part of our course was the deep dive. It was up at 06.15 the next morning without a breakfast and straight into our wetsuits. When we had completed our Open Water course previously, the deepest you can dive to is 18 metres. The Advanced course takes you to 30 metres. It's about the height of a ten storey building, except down the way. To demonstrate the effects of these depths on the body we had to carry out a few exercises on the bottom. Tanya, our instructor took an underwater slate down to the bottom with her and she had written a grid with the numbers 1 to 20 on it all jumbled up. The idea was to time us counting to 20 by pointing at each number and then our nose in the right order. Nae bother thinks I. It took me 95 seconds to count to 20 down there and it took Lee 108 seconds. What happens is that at tjhose depths, a lot of nitrogen builds up in your blood and it has a similar effect that alcohol has on the surface, it impairs your judgement and your reactions. Consequently, the sight of a fish swimming past us doing nothing sent us into fits of the giggles (no small feat when youare 30 meters down and unable to laugh. Deep diving is not as interesting as diving nearer the surface as most of the sealife lives near the surface so there is more to see. A deep dive is a brilliant experience though.

As another part of the course, we were given an underwater camera to go down and take some photos and videos to get some memories of the trip (some of which can hopefully be seen here on this blog). Parents, do you rmember taking us kids to get our school photos done and trying to get us to stay still and smile and cuddle our brothers or sisters at the same time. You should try it with fish by the way. They don't listen, they won't stay still, they are the worst behaved subjects you could imagine. Think about it, if some animal 100 times the size of you stuck his SuperFuji 100 into your living room and tried to take a photo, would you not feel inclined to smile politley, show it your best side and let it get on it's way ?? Not fish though. We did manage to get some photos though, some good, some pure minging but it was a lot of fun all the same. We had to give a photo show once we got back on the boat and show off our handiwork as well, and while Lee was taking her DVD out it's case, it shatters and the dive guys have deleted the memory card. They kindly offered to let Lee take the camera out again the next morning and get some more pictures but we did lose quite a lot of decent shots.

That night, on our second night dive, was probably when we had the most fun. As we were all suited and booted and standing on the back of the boat waiting to get in, Keil, the American guys shouts that if anyone wants to get to see some sharks, then there were about 4 circling about 5 meteres down below him. Sure enough, there they were, 2 metre long white tip reef sharks and we had to jump in beside them. It's just the weirdest feeling saying to yourself "oh look, a shark, let's get in about them eh?", it goes against every impulse you have naturally but once you're in there they just come within about 4 or 5 metres of you, check you out and then swim off. Of course given that they have the brain the size of a 5 cent piece, they do this a lot because they keep forgetting what you are.

It was also on this dive that we saw Brian. Brian is this absolutley massive turtle that lives on Flynn Reef and barely moves off the bottom because of his size. The turtle has been known as Brian for years but recently was found to be a girl, so they re-maed him/her Brianna, awwww. You should have seen the size of this thing though. It was like someone had driven a mini cooper off a boat and left it down there.

The last morning of our trip we had three dives to do before 11 o'clock in the morning and they were all fun dives which meant we could just head off and do our own thing. Our first dive we were in a group of four of us and were just pootling (not a technical term, but a good one I reckon) along and we round a big rock. It's about half six in the morning and there are 2 or three fairly big reef sharks just kipping on the bottom. Lee managed to get a video of one of htem swimming off and we managed to get within about 4 feet of some turtles as well which was amazing too. The rest of our fun dives were pretty uneventful but to be honest, even if you see absolutely nothing, there is no feeling like it on earth, it's wicked. We had some great memories form the Great Barrier Reef and we can now tick off one of the 10-things-to-do-before-I-die list. Which is nice.

Once got back to Cairns, the dive guys organise a get together at one of the local restaurants so everyone went along that night. As always, things started off nice and polite but later on Team Scotland got wind of a two-for-one night at the club across the roas so off we all went to that. The rest of the night is a blur to be honest, but we were all dancing on tables, drinking silly drinks and generally having a good time. Didn't feel like it when we got up in the morning though.

We had three days to kill in Cairns and to be honest we spent them pretty much at the hostel. We've not had that much experience of hostel life so far so it was nice to be able to get into the swing of things before we leave Bris Vegas and take off up the coast to do our fruit picking and such hi jinks. I think we'll like it though, food and drink is cheap and everyone is mighty friendly so it all bodes well for the next leg of our adventures.

After that it was back to Brisbane and back to work for the next wee while to replenish our shattered finances. It's got to be done though and we can't wait to get back to Cairns.

See you all later.

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Comments

[Wee Sis]

Wow
That looks totally amazing guys. Really really cool - im pretty jealous. The fish tank at work totally pales in comparison. Just to let you know that i have booked my flight out to Sydney. I arrive in Sydney on 29th December and leave on 15th January. My camp is between 30th December and 11th Jan then will have 4 days to kick around Sydney - hopefully with you guys. You can also come visit the campsite.Woohoo well excited. Catch you soon Elaine xxx

[Lal]

Absolutely Fabulous.
All the diaries have been great, but this one must be the best ever. You both look so happy and the photographs are wonderful. XX Lal.