More Scuba Diving!

After our first trip, we were eager to go out diving again and less than a week later we found ourselves back on the boat for another three day adventure because we had a few days to kill before where we were going to be staying in Cairns would be available.  The boat had a totally different crew, and vibe of people, but it was no less fun and we got to dive together the entire time, enjoying much more of the reef (for me anyway) than we had on our first trip.  I remembered to take photos of our accommodations this time so here’s where we stayed on the boat, the view from our top bunk one morning and the teeny-tiny bathroom/shower.

I, unfortunately, had a bit of congestion (likely from the mold growing on the wall in the hotel room we’d stayed at the previous few nights) which is dangerous for diving as you can’t equalize your ears and can make it quite painful when you’re descending to depth but it only prevented me from going on the first night dive and didn’t otherwise impair the trip.  We had several exciting encounters underwater this time that we didn’t previously and this outing’s dives full of marine life.  We got an up-close view of a white tipped reef shark that swam within three feet of me on our night dive.  I was super pumped but Alex was less than impressed.  We saw a school of bumphead parrotfish the next morning that he was a bit more keen on.  Check out their ‘teeth’ – they look ferocious but they only use them to bit of bits of coral to eat.  I was quite excited to see a lionfish and it looked beautiful set against a piece of green branch coral (though poisonous so I didn’t get too close).  My camera was set on some funky setting so the photo is unusual but I kinda like how it turned out.  And one photo that I forgot to share from our last dive, a close-up of a jellyfish!

Once again turtles were my favorite!  We finally saw Bryan, a 140 year old turtle who is bigger than two dining room tables put together and quite famous on the reef, and two other huge turtles.  There’s no way to describe him other than ‘massive’ and he lives on the reef we dived the second day.  Our best bet at seeing him was in his den at night and sadly on our last trip our instructor didn’t find him.  This trip we navigated to his den ourselves and there he was, along with two other giants sleeping in dens nearby.  Despite hearing about him repeatedly, I was still surprised by his size when we saw him in person (since it was a night dive, I didn’t have the camera but no photos would have turned out anyway b/c it was dark and we only had flashlights).  On a different dive, we came across another, normal sized, turtle who was keen to interact with us.  He swam right up to Alex, checked him out for a bit, then snacked on some coral before swimming away through Alex’s fins.  It was awesome and I got a few photos of it so you guys could enjoy as well!

Alex face to face with a friendly turtle

This trip we also saw some bigger fish (not sure if you can get a sense of their size in the photo but they were quite large and let us swim right up to them) that I thought were quite cool so here are some pics of them.  The last one is a barracuda, they were a little more cautious of divers so this was as close as we got to any but it was still awesome to see them in the water.

We decided to get our Advanced Open Water diving certification this trip because we got a discount for being repeat customers and we liked the instructors so much.  All three of our Adventure diver certification dives counted towards our Advanced cert so we only needed two more dives – underwater navigation and one educational dive of our choice (we chose peak performance buoyancy).  Buoyancy isn’t my strong suit and Alex put me to shame on our course.  He was hovering in the water for a solid ten minutes or so before I was able to master the skill, much to his enjoyment.  I had the last laugh though because for our final exercise our instructor put a dive knife in the sand and we had to swim up and touch it with our nose without touching the ocean floor and I was able to do that first.  Of course Alex made him leave it there until he got it too so that dive I’ll give to him.  Underwater navigation went to me though (in spite of the fact that, on our first few dives of the trip, we got pretty turned around on and ended up quite a long swim from the boat).  The instruction consisted of using our compass to swim patterns underwater (a useful tactic utilized when searching for missing divers but only effective if you stay on course) and we both did well though my triangle was actually a triangle whereas Alex’s was not, giving me the edge for the dive.  (Even with our flaws, we were both good enough on both dives to pass the course, making us AOW certified and able to dive to depths of 40m!)  One other thing I was super excited about on our underwater navigation dive (besides besting Alex) was the up-close shot of a sting ray that our instructor took with my camera.  We’d seen stingrays repeatedly on our dives but never when I had a camera (of course) and I reaaaaallllly wanted to get a photo of one since they were one of my favorites underwater.  Our instructor pointed out the stingray before we descended so once down there I swam over and got a few pics.  He had a lot of underwater photography experience from his work on other boats so when I came back, sensing my ineptitude, he took the camera and swam back over for a shot of his own.  You’ll probably notice his photo is better than any of the ones I took.  The second shot is my original photo - I thought that was close enough…

Last but not least, I want to share the story of one of the guys we met on the boat, Randy.  He was a 60yo dive instructor from Phoenix, with well over 3,000 dives under his belt, who came to Australia to dive with his wife and two of their friends.  His friends’ daughter, also named Kristen, was along for the trip too and wearing a Chicago FPD shirt the first day so we quickly got to talking and were then introduced to Randy and his wife and her parents.  It was easy to see right away that Randy is just a great guy.  He was so friendly, offering us tips on our diving and sharing in our excitement for everything we saw underwater, and eventually he told us the story of how he’d ended up on this trip.  He was on the show Undercover Boss last year and, when the CEO revealed himself, he paid off Randy’s mortgage, gave him $50,000 in cash and a first-class trip anywhere in the world.  Incredible, right?  Well, even more incredible is that, the night we got off the boat, I was flipping channels on the TV while Alex finished getting ready and Randy’s Undercover Boss episode was ON TV.  Aaaand, Randy was actually on TV at the exact moment I flipped through.  Maybe you’re not that impressed, but Alex & I both could not believe the coincidence and are still talking about it.  If that didn’t do it for you, here’s a photo of Alex and I getting ready to dive and a shot of another beautiful evening on the boat for your enjoyment J