Sunday June 20, 2010

---

Last night was miserable. We tried to get to the reef but almost capsized in the process. We sailed half way there, and the skipper had to turn the boat around and motor back or risk flipping the boat. I took some seasickness meds the night before, so my sleep was really intermittent. However, I did sleep through all of the things on the shelf emptying onto Anna and Susanne and a shower’s worth of water coming in through the hatch. The seas were extremely rough when I woke up, and I honestly didn’t want to go diving. Breakfast was again at 7 and after eating I was feeling very nauseous. Today was out deep dive and we would be going to about 35-40m. Once in the water I felt much better pretty quickly. At depths below 25-30m divers run the risk of doing dumb things such as attempting to give their oxygen to fish due to change in gasses. We did a few exercises to show that we were ok including taking out our regulators and replacing them after about a minute (all while blowing out bubbles to prevent gas buildup), writing our names backwards on the write on board and flooding our masks with water, then clearing them again. After that we started to go up a bit, all the while seeing AMAZING coral structures. They were huge and the coral wall we were going up against was at least the 40m tall. When we got out of the water I was REALLY cold. We set sail for Blue Pearl Bay and I slept in the sun on the side of the boat ☺ At Blue Pearl Bay we were supposed to do a drift dive, but the current was really weak so we did a fish ID dive. We had to get a list of at least 5 fish that we could identify and point out underwater. This time we had a new dive instructor, Harry and he filled up an empty water bottle with bread. Underwater we all kneeled in a circle then he opened the bottle and squirted out some of the bread. We were soon surrounded by at least 100 fish and they were so close they let us touch them. After pointing out different fish we went to ‘the maze’ which was a series of coral structures and tunnels. We went through, under, over and around the different structures sometimes swimming through tunnels so skinny I could feel my tank rubbing on the rock above me. Honestly, that dive was the reason people dive. It is so amazing to be in a completely alien underwater world surrounded by corals, fish and other critters. At one point we stopped at a giant anenome and Harry pointed out that we could touch it. When I saw him touch it all of a sudden a few clown fish appeared from within the tentacles and you could see the flat sheet of anenome tentacles start to recoil. When I touched it, it almost felt like touching tape, and my fingers stuck to it a bit, shocking me. I must have looked like a kid in a candy store, because Harry gave me a huge smile and OK sign (remember no thumbs up, that means go to surface so we make a ok symbol with our ring finger and thumb). When we got out of the water I headed back to the boat, dropped off my tank, gear and stinger suit and headed to the small coral beach where a bunch of the snorkelers were resting. There was no sand to speak of and the beach consisted of coral chunks not smaller than my thumb finger. We watched the sunset which was absolutely gorgeous with a few other sail boats on the horizon. I talked to a crew member, an Aboriginal named Dave and he told me that the boat I saw flipped in the harbor the other day had flipped here. It came around one of the inlets and the wind caught it just the right way and it went right over. Luckily everyone was ok. Later on I found out that Simon has been spending the past week salvaging all of the stuff from the area below where it flipped.
After the sunset we all went back to the boat and warmed up and had dinner. I have to say the food on the boat was delicious and they made sure to make the food delicious and healthy at the same time. After dinner we saw a bunch of fish swimming around the outside of the boat including some very large Giant Trevele (a large predatory fish), a Moray Ell that came to the surface (very rare) and even a bottlenose dolphin. After a bit we got ready for our night dive. I was pretty cold, so I waited till the last minute to get into my stinger suit, get all my gear and get into the water. Descending into the water we saw a sleeping turtle, a few lobsters and a HUGE coral trout that popped up right in front of my face when I went through an underwater tunnel. We had our flashlights and were able to look inside different coral structures and could see fish tucked away sleeping. It was awesome!! It was a bit weird knocking into things as there was so much around, and after a bit I was ready to get out of the water and into my warm clothes. Out of the water I dried off, warmed up, talked to some of the other passengers and went to bed after a bit.

---