[Being written on Monday]
Being on a dive boat is a relatively solitary affair. In essence you get up at 6am and fall into the water at 6:30. You swim around with your buddy, occaissionally seeing the same things (as it's quite hard to attract attention under water -- a bit like being deaf and unable to make any noise) then you come up and eat, write your log of the last dive ("I saw some fish!") and then wait an hour or so until the next dive. It's sunny, hot and in the middle of the ocean on an (invariably) white ship, very bright [which means I hide!]. [Hmm, why do I do it, then?] A few things differ on this boat. Firstly, there's a heap of students who do things in large groups so natter a lot together, they're very particular about depth and time limits (time being less of an issue as you generally run out of air) and finally, this boat doesn't move much. This morning we moved about 7km from the previous reef. The reefs are now decent with good hard and soft corals and some pleasant fishes[sic]. It's not like the Maldives, though, with steep drop-offs, drift dives or strong currents (for sharks). You get the impression we get to dive where the conditions are suitable for open water beginners. Interesting and good experience for us, especially regarding our breathing, but not exciting [or challenging].
We're on our own for tonight's night dive, last night the skipper took us around and we saw six sleeping turtles -- they wedge themselves under bits of coral for a couple of hours then go up for a breath of air -- so it should be more "interesting." The dive briefing was the usual simplistic map of bommies with instructions. Of course, underwater the bommies look completely different or have grown and we end up in a dead end with a patrolling four foot white-tip reef shark [they're harmless to divers btw]. There must have been another exit, sharks aren't that stupid, but we backed off anyway. A few minutes later we spot a torch beam and head off in that direction to find the boat shortly before our 30 minutes were up.
Flynn Reef, Great Barrier Reef S16.73232
E146.26675 Elev. 29m!
Copyright 2003 Ian Fitchet. All rights reserved.