Tuesday April 11th

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Tuesday April 11th

Today is our snorkeling trip to the Great Barrier Reef, one of the highlights of this trip.

We decided to do this trip from Port Douglas rather than Cairns, as the tour operators up there are better, and more personalized with smaller groups. We head up at 7 am, with our boat leaving around 8:30. We didn’t get lost, which was nice, and arrive around 8 to meet the crew. There are 3 crew members a big croc wrestler guy, a girl named Natalie who’s a marine biologist, and another guy, our ships captain. So we’re off to the first of 3 snorkeling sites. The boat ride out takes approximately 2 hours and we’re pretty far out, barely seeing Australia. Wesley really likes Natalie, and talks to her a lot during the ride. It’s stinger season here so we all get lycra body suits, which the jelly fish won’t sting. These box jellyfish can make you really sick; even kill, so we don’t mind looking funny. The kids look really funny, as they have green and yellow suits, the rest of us black ones.

Our first site is great, lots of really big corals, and big fish, and the water is so warm, like 30 degrees, it felt more like a bathtub than the ocean. And Natalie was complaining of how much a shock it was… While in the ocean Wesley turned into an Olympic swimmer, when Natalie went in, and did a tour of the area, Wes was right there behind her. I thought we would have had to stay close to him, but we couldn’t keep up. He was right on her tail, asking questions about everything he saw. It really was quite the sight. Even the sharks didn’t faze him, as we saw 3.

We did the 2 other sites, which were equally great, spending about 1 hour at each. We had a good lunch onboard. Then we headed back to mainland, our trip over, I would definitely do this over again. Wes is really sad, and misses Natalie tremendously. On the drive back to Cairns we stop off at the opal mine, and buy a couple of things there. For dinner that night we ate at the sizzler restaurant, the food is ok, and everyone likes it!

More tomorrow!

Lee

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Photos

Barracuda
look at those teeth!

Comments

[Brad]

Great pics
Looks like you had an amazing time. We just got back from Oz and dove both the GBR and Ningaloo Reefs. Hope you continue to have a great trip, we wish we were still there.