Australia Adventures day 16: On the boat

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G'day mates,

Today we got up at 4:45 am. Sigh. The guys from the dive centre picked us up at 5:45 am, but was almost half an hour late. Great, we lost half an hour extra in bed. So at sunset, we were in a mini van, picking up people from different hotels, to go to the boat for a 3 day dive trip. With only a backpack full of clothes..
When we arrived at the dive shop, I had to sign some medical stuff, because I wanted to do the Advanced Open Water dive course. At the question 'Do you have sea sickness?', I answered yes, because I have just a little tiny bit of motion sickness. Not a good idea, because the guy at the counter turned out to be less flexible then I thought. He said that he had to take me to a doctor who had to state that my motion sickness was unmentionable, before I could take the course. And that could take the whole day, so he estimated that I would arrive a whole day later at the trip than planned. So with all this going on, I decided to skip the course. No point missing 1 out of 3 days diving. So I got on the boat, just for tourism diving, really andgry and sad. But nothing to do about it.
After 3 hours of bumping on the boat, I finally got to dive. I first entered the Great Barrier Reef at 11:15 and had a 41 minute dive. I saw a great barracude for the first time ever, and some cute anemone fish, parrotfishes and unicornfish. With over 25 meters of sight and a water temperature of 24 degrees celsius, I got out of the water. It felt ice cold!! After a shower and some (suprisingly) good lunch, I did a second dive at 14:30. 37 minutes long and again great fish: damsel fish, rabbit fish, and surgeon fish. Another shower and a snack later, I skipped the 3rd dive. Just for some warming and enjoying the sunny weather on the top deck. The cook Max was an amazing guy. Really shy, but he made us the most amazing meals. After the great dinner, I decided to do the night dive. Really scary, because I had never done that before! At 7:30 pm I entered the water with a torch and a pink glowing stick on my air bottle. Our dive supervisor told us that it could be possible that morray eels got attracted to these glowing sticks and would try to bite them of. Funny story! So my sister and I did the night dive together with a guide. It was a ma zing! Really a great experience! We saw some black & white tip reefsharks, a really big sleeping turtle I named Sleepy Sammy, a guitar shark and a whiteface waspfish. I really loved the turtle. With his head stucked under a rock and only his back legs and his bum outside to see. Such an experience. But when I came out of the water, it turned out my glowing stick was gone.. That morray eel.. After the dive, we quickly changed into our night clothes, had some chats with the boat staff and some other guests and went to our bumping bed.

Kisses, Rosalinde

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