I'll start from the beginning, I suppose. Two weeks ago on Thursday, I started my volunteer position on Mike Ball Dive Expeditions, an excellent liveaboard dive boat out of Cairns. They do 3, 4, and 7 day dive trips out to the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea. I was initially on for a week as a domestic volunteer.
Now, before I bore you with an account of every single dive that I went on and every fish that I saw (I won't do that, we'd be here for a week), I'll explain a little of what I did as a volunteer. I spent the majority of the time working with the hostess, Becks and the chef, Levi. I initially wanted to be down on the dive deck helping out with the diving side of things, but I really had a blast hanging out in the kitchen. Becks are Levi are really fun people and there was a lot of laughter coming out of that kitchen. I helped out with some food prep (although it was quickly discovered that I cannot cut a watermelon in straight, even pieces to save my life), lots and lots and lots of dishes, cleaning up the guest rooms, lots of vacuuming and other similar chores. It was hard work, but I was rewarded with some of the best diving I have ever done.
The first dive that I did on our first day on the water I couldn't contain myself. I was seeing coral in colors that I didn't know existed. I practically screamed when I saw my first giant clam. And lets not even talk about how excited I was when the white-tip reef shark swam by. I think my dive buddy, an experienced diver who had spent a good bit of time in the Great Barrier Reef, thought I was an absolute nut.
The next amazing, jaw-dropping dive was later that afternoon when we dove a site called the Snake Pit. Now I had kind of forgotten that sea snakes even exist. We sure don't have them in S. Florida or the Caribbean... But as soon as we dropped down, BAM. At least four or five olive sea snakes, just swimming around like its nothing. Now, sea snakes are actual snakes (as opposed to eels which are fish) and breath air and flick their tongues and act just like regular snakes, except they're 60 feet underwater. Awesome.
Olive sea snake
The first day we spent on the GBR, but that night we ran up to Osprey Reef in the Coral Sea. This is a reef that comes out of nowhere. The water surrounding the reef is literally thousands of feet deep, which means really really epic wall dives. On the first dive at Opsrey Reef, a site called Halfway, I went to nearly 100 feet, but I could see down at least another 100 feet, and it was just sheer walls of coral and blue water as far as you could see below.
This picture is the best one I have showing the wall, but it goes
for probably 1000 feet just like that...
At Osprey Reef, we also did a shark feed at a site called North Horn. There's an area in the coral that almost looks like an amphitheater. They do this shark feed usually once a week, so the sharks know that as soon as the boat shows up, there will be some tuna heads. When we jumped into the water, there were already maybe 15 or 20 sharks swimming around. After everyone got settled, sitting still and not moving around, they brought down three tuna heads in a garbage can. When the tuna heads came out of the garbage can, 30-40 grey reef sharks and a dozen white-tip reef sharks went at it, full feeding frenzy style. It was AMAZING. I felt like I was in a documentary or something, watching these sharks tear into the tuna heads. Really neat to be able to witness that many sharks in that small of a place.
After Osprey Reef, we stopped at Lizard Island and changed some passengers. Some stayed on for a week, but we traded out about half of the passengers for some new ones that were on for the 3 day leg of the trip. We bounced back through the GBR diving at some other amazing sites like Acropolis, which was the best coral cover I have ever seen on any reef ever.
So over the course of this first week, I discovered that while the other two volunteers were on for two weeks, I was initially only scheduled for one week. I definitely wanted more diving. There was going to be some crew shuffling after the first week and when we got back to Cairns after seven amazing days on the water, we realized that the video pro wasn't going to be on for the second week, meaning there would be an extra bed in the crew cabins. We got back into Cairns, cleaned up the boat and then the crew had a couple hours on dry land before the boat was leaving again. I hung around the boat, waiting for the operations manager or the captain to show up so I could try and talk my way on for another week. Eventually the captain came out and asked if I wanted to be on for another week, of course I said yes. He asked if there was anything I needed to get done before the boat left again. I did, I needed some clean clothes... He told me to RUN. I had to be back on the boat in 45 minutes if I wanted to be on for the second week. Instead of running home (I never would have made it) I wound up running to mall and picking up a few essentials from Target (yeah, Australia has Target, its wonderful).
I was back on the boat for round two! And round two was even better! This trip was a week long, no stopping in the middle and switching passengers and it was a deep reef expedition. We went to some deep reefs in the coral sea that hadn't been dove in quite some time. Some of the guests on the boat were excellent rebreather and technical divers, going to 160 ft and more, exploring depths of these reefs that had never been explored. Even though I didn't go that deep, I still saw some amazing things like....
SO MANY SHARKS
And potato cod!!! (like a goliath grouper, only more personable)
NEMOS
And really amazing reef fish...
It was a really amazing two weeks and I did some of the most amazing diving I've ever done. The people on the boat were so much fun and I would love to get back out there again... This was definitely an experience I will never forget and I feel so lucky to have had this opportunity...
Now, I'm off to try and find a real paying job! Wish me luck!
Love and fishes!
No comments:
Post a Comment