A 5:30 start for the 6:15 pickup. We listen to a couple of "young people" tell tales of night time action en route to fit suits, pay and be dropped off at the boat. After a couple of "keep our boat clean" lectures we divide up and we turn out to be on a school boat, there's only 10 certified divers out of 30 odd guests, the rest are learning to dive [in fact, of them about half are getting advanced training...]. That's not a bad thing but it does give a certain clustering to the movements of people on board. The style is very different to the Blue Shark II in a difficult to explain manner, maybe there's less support all round, we're just another boat of customers. We certainly don't get the guides (bar the first dive) and we're thrown into the water as buddy pairs with a few clues as to what was where. The reef at the first mooring was big slabs with blank sand in between. Not only is the sand largely devoid of fish life but is hard to navigate over which given we have only a bearing and a vague clue: "there's an anemone with some barrier reef anemone fish over there" makes life a bit tricky. Compared to the Maldives this point isn't overwhelmed with fish life either. We have been blessed with many riches on this [round the world] trip.
The third dive was guided by the skipper (obviously bored with skippering and engineering) and we went round some much better reefs: more fish, more corals, some turtles. The night dive was a bit hit and miss. Helen on dive three and I this time both had our alternates (tucked into rubber bands on the tanks!) start to purge which was a pain because they're then difficult to reach and you lose air rapidly. The dive itself wasn't too bad, we saw six sleeping turtles (up to 2m [not sure about 2m but they were quite big]) and plenty of orange-red crustacean eyes peering out of the coral but a lot of it was drawn out trudge across sandy stretches between "bommies" (derived from the Aboriginal meaning: bit of reef). They're pretty strict here in Queensland, if you don't watch your depth and "reverse" (a subsequent dive [in one day] is deeper than this) then you're banned for the rest of the day. Given that you can struggle to get any depth that's an important thing. [Indeed, on some dives your first task was to swim off somewhere different to "get your depth" then return to the starting point and carry on. Duh!]
There's a few wide boys and girls from England -- one of this morning's young people is having a fling with the cook (who can free dive to 24m, btw). I lost the bezel or at least the insert with the numbers on it from my watch before or making that last dive. That makes it [my bezelled diving watch] pretty useless [other than as an expensive watch].
Milln Reef, Swimming Pool I, Great Barrier Reef S16.79205 E146.26427 Elev. 45m!
Copyright 2003 Ian Fitchet. All rights reserved.