Different boats, new adventures!

Hello friends!!

So things on the boat have been a-changing lately! Reef Experience, lovingly called Rex for short, has been my home away from home for the last four months and change. Rex got pulled out of the water about a week ago for some much needed love. She's up in the dry docks getting all new insides. The saloon is getting completely re-done, including a new floor and everything.

In the meantime, we're just running our other boat, Compass. Compass is the cheaper boat, aimed at backpackers and low-budget travelers. It's a slow single-hull boat, taking about two and a half hours to get out to the reef, compared to Rex's hour and a half. BUT Compass is a hell of a lot of fun. It's a different crowd, a lot more chill and relaxed. I started working on Compass this week and it's taken a bit of getting used to, since its a whole new boat that I've barely worked on with whole new quirks. But this boat has really grown on me. It's a nice relaxed time with less passengers than Rex, so I've had a lot of time to hop in for some snorkels and dives. Even took a couple of pictures the other day!

We've had beautiful clear water lately... the weather has been AMAZING. Hopefully it keeps holding! 

This is Frank. He's our local Maori wrasse... it's hard to tell in this picture, but he's about 4 and a half feet long. Frank doesn't like being photographed, so he's rather hard to chase down. But he's awesome. 

Backtracking just a pinch... as I said, Rex is on refit, which I get to help out with! Something that's completely outside my comfort zone, for sure... I went out and bought the tiniest steel-cap boots I could possibly find. A size 3 in men's thank you. I felt rather silly. I've only done one day so far, but it was pretty cool! The floor of the saloon is gone, which exposes the engine room and the hulls and all kinds of other things I've never really seen. I'm not very good at this taking Rex apart, but I'm looking forward to putting her back together again!

Oh, one other rather entertaining anecdote that happened today.... our glass bottom boat lives out on the reef permanently. We pick it up at the reef, use it for the tours during the day and then it stays on the reef until the following day when it all happens again. It's a small boat, only maybe 15 or 20 feet long. Now, the reef that the glass bottom boat lives on is rather remote. There's nothing around for miles and miles. This means the glassy is a very popular perch for sea birds. Sea birds poop. Therefore, our glassy is constantly covered in bird poop and it's a pain to clean every day... it can be time consuming depending on how many birds were around, and its just downright gross. Our captain came up with a plan a few days ago and went out and bought some of those fake owls that they use to scare birds on land. The only problem is these birds that are causing our problems are SEAbirds. Birds that almost never go to the mainland, except maybe to breed. They've never ever seen an owl!! They have no idea that it's supposed to be scary! We'll see if it works, but my money's on NOPE! The boat does look pretty silly with two big plastic owls on top of it though! 

That's about all that's new and exciting for now! Sending lots of love back home! 

Love and fishes! 

Whales and cuttlefish and power tools, oh my!

Alright, so firstly a big sloppy apology for my lack of posts. This is due to a handful of reasons.

1. Nothing super fun and exciting and out of the ordinary was happening UNTIL
2. My internet died again.
3. Now, I would love to have gone to an internet cafe and write a post, BUT
4. I've been working almost every day of the last two weeks due to Easter holidays.

Basically the day I was going to post something cool and exciting, the internet died and it has just now been resurrected. I blame the kangaroos. Or the wombats.

So I do have quite a bit to update on... firstly WHALES.

Last week, it was a totally normal, average day at work. About 80 people on the boat, light winds, pretty good visibility. One of my co-workers and I were standing on the snorkel platform gearing up people and getting them in the water. I saw a big splash out of the corner of my eye. Now, this is not unusual, there are lots of shallow bits of coral around, and waves break over top of them all the time. But then I saw a big fin come out of the splash!

Initially we thought it was a huge school of dolphins, but then we realized they were huge and black, which can mean only one thing! Pilot whales!

They look pretty similar to dolphins, but they're much larger and black. But these guys were amazing. They were maybe 50 meters from the boat at the closest and they were jumping and diving and breaching. Our passengers were slightly intrigued, whereas the crew were standing on the deck, mask and fins in hand, ready to jump in if they got any closer. In total there were probably close to fifty whales, including some babies! Throughout the day, we would hear them occasionally in the water, which meant they hadn't gone far, but we didn't see them again after the morning. 

A few days ago, I had another really fun animal encounter. It was a really chill day on the boat, only 30 passengers, so I was able to jump in for a quick fun dive. I found this awesome cuttlefish, which are one of my favorite critters for sure. They're really smart and you can tell when you look at them that they're really thinking about things. They change color and pattern really quickly, giving them some amazing camouflage. But I chased this guy around for the better part of my 20 minute dive, watching him change colors and get more comfortable around be and letting me get closer and closer and closer. Cuttlefish are AWESOME. 

So now, things on the boat are going to start changing a lot... we're pulling out Reef Experience (my boat) for refit. She's going to be all nice and shiny... getting new floors, new chairs, a whole new interior. The boat's going to be out of the water for at least 6 weeks. During that time we'll still be running Compass, which is our company's other boat. I know I'll definitely be helping out with refit things, which means I need to go buy steel-toed boots... what? But it'll be interesting to see the boat come out of the water and get to have a hand in some of the work. Chances are I'll also be working on Compass a little bit. I'm not entirely sure how its all going to go just yet, but Rex comes out of the water on Tuesday, so I'll be able to let you know soon! 

Now, I pinky pinky swear it will not be so long until my next post. I'm sure I'll have some interested stories to tell about me in steel-toed boots with power tools. 

Love and fishes! 

Adventures in Townsville!

Long, long ago in a land quite far away, I studied abroad in a little island nation called the Turks and Caicos Islands... there, I met some really amazing super cool friends that I'm still in contact with and run into from time to time. One of these lovely people is my friend Heather, who is living out here in Oz going to grad school! She lives about 4 hours south of me, in Townsville. Heather came up to Cairns last week to help out with a research project out on the reef and when she went back to Townsville, I tagged along for a couple days!

It was really nice to get out of town for a bit and see more of this big rock I'm living on. Townsville is a pretty cool area, it's got James Cook University and an army base, so its definitely got a different vibe than Cairns, which is primarily tourists, backpackers and divers.

One day, we went to this SWEET waterfall called Jourma Falls

On the road to Jourma

View of the falls from the lookout... we started down at the bottom and hiked up the rocks beside the waterfalls and made it up pretty high! There were little pools connecting the falls, so we would climb up to another one, swim around in the pool and cool off before headed up to the next fall. 

Checking out the falls...

One of the big falls near the top! The tallest one we got to. 

There were lots of great places for some cliff jumping action, lots of swimming and even hanging out behind a waterfall! We had such a fun, adventure day. It started raining as we were heading back down, and by the time we got back, the water had risen so much that the little boardwalk we walked in on (in the first picture) was underwater!

The next day I had some time to explore town on my own. There are lots of neat little shops and restaurants and a really nice beach area called the Strand, similar to Cairns' Esplanade, but the Strand actually has sand! Of course, the first thing I really found in Townsville was the aquarium! Shocking, I know. 

Leopard shark!!!

So many nemos!!!

There's a great big red rock in the middle of town called Castle Hill... apparently its only a few meters shy of being considered a mountain, so its only a hill. Poor thing. One afternoon Heather and I made the epic journey up the hill! There's a path going up it, and loads of active people running or walking up it. Meanwhile, I was huffing and puffing and complaining about altitude sickness. I don't encounter mountains in the ocean very often! Walking up hills is HARD. 

View from the top! That's Townsville and Magnetic Island chillin on the horizon. 

We also had an adventure to Alligator Falls as well, but unfortunately my camera died and I didn't get any photos :( BUT one of the coolest parts about Alligator Falls... Wallabys!!!! Everywhere! With baby wallabys!!! It was magical.

Had an absolute blast in Townsville, but now its back to work (if you can call it that...haha).

Sending lots of hugs stateside! 

Love and fishes!   

Fun with tourists...

Hey all!

Sorry I've been missing in action lately... I've been having a lot of technological problems with my internet! Technology doesn't like me much.

Life down under is still going swimmingly! The boats have been very busy for the last two weeks because of Chinese New Year. The actual new year was about a week and a half ago now, but its a pretty long holiday season. Since China's really not that far from Australia in the global scheme of things, we've had an influx of tourists the last couple of weeks.


Luckily we have a couple of Chinese translators working on the boat, otherwise we'd all be in trouble. Between the lot of us, most people know a little of one language or another, which comes in handy for translating tourist problems.

We have heaps of people that come to the boat with no idea what snorkeling is, let alone what a coral reef is. This is one of my favorite exchanges on the boat:

Do you know how to swim?? (with appropriate swimming charades)
-Nods
Are you suuuuuure?
-Nods
Okay then, in you go... head that way toward the reef.
-Drowns.

In the last few weeks I've done so many snorkel rescues... there was one day when I didn't take my fins off for a good thirty minutes because I kept having to hop in and rescue something... people, noodles, cameras, hats....

At the end of the day, we have passengers fill out comment cards about how their day was. One of my favorites, word for word:

-You should have warned us about the saltwater. 

Some other fun comment cards I've seen recently:

-The one in the blue shirt was smart (we're all in blue shirts...)
-Why aren't there more seahorses? 
-There should be some shade on the sundeck (Ahem... its the SUNdeck...)

Some days we have really good bunches of tourists. It was easy a few days ago... we had a group of 60 American college students on a study abroad program. There was a joke on the boat that if anyone had trouble, I was the American translator. Other days we have 50 people out of 100 on the boat that speak no English and don't know how to swim and put all their masks on upside down. Ohhhh boy. We all end up at the pub on the end of those days because after 10 hours of that, you NEED a drink.

But it all keeps things entertaining and you've got something to laugh about at the pub at the end of the day. Life is good on the boat and in Cairns. I realized the other day that I've been here 3 months already. I feel like I've been living here forever! Life is good!

I promise I won't be so long with another post! I'll get my internet fixed sooner, haha!


Love and fishes.  

Cyclones, Australia Day and bungee jumping! Oh my!

Well, I can honestly say that life in Australia is never boring...

Last week we got blown around a little bit by a cyclone with the most unfortunate name ever. Oswald. Cyclone Oswald cruised down the coast of Australia, giving us some nasty winds and rain, but not much else. It was enough wind and rain to keep the boat off the reef for three days though! Three days off of work! Too bad it was raining and windy and gross!

Now in Cairns, we got pretty lucky. Pretty minimal damage. Areas further south got nailed by rain and flooding and they're still having trouble as far as I understand.

So the day that the boat finally got back up and running was a very popular holiday around these parts... namely Australia Day! Pretty similar holiday to the 4th of July... lots of beers, BBQs and red white and blues. Although a slightly different flag. The only thing missing are fireworks!

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! 

So at work, we were all decked out in Australia flag fake tattoos, flags, I even made breakfast in an Australia flag apron. We had an awesome day out on the reef, good times for all. After work we had a BBQ at one of the crew's house, had some beers and said a lot of Australian things. The majority of the people I work with aren't Aussies... we're from all over the world (Canada and England mostly... but also France, New Zealand, other miscellaneous parts of Europe, Taiwan) , so it's fun when we're all pretending to be Australian! 

I had a few days off earlier this week... the first day I was super productive and got everything done, ran a bunch of errands. The next day I had nothing to do... soooooo I went bungee jumping!!! Yayyyy! It was awesome. So much fun, but so freaking intimidating!!! I was definitely more afraid on the top of the bungee tower than I was skydiving. I'm definitely going to go again... now I've got a frequent jumpers card :)

Other than that, just living it up in the insane Cairns heat... It's been near 100 F (38C) for the last week! It's been so bloody hot!!! I'm so glad I work on a boat most of the time and can just jump in the water whenever I feel like it! It's been beautiful on the water though... all the heat and the lack of wind has just made it super glassy out on the reef. It's amazingggggg! Everyone should come visit :) 

Love and fishes! 

It's raining... sharks!

Well, it's finally happened... the wet season that everyone ranted and raved about is here. It's been raining for days in Cairns... good news is that I don't work in Cairns! Not really, anyway! I work about 40km away on this lovely large reef...

Despite days of rain lately, the reef has been beautiful the last two days. Yesterday it was forecast to be blowing 25 knots (which is rather windy...) and it was supposed to be raining on the reef all day. The morning was a little overcast, with a bit of a drizzle on the trip out, but by mid-day it was AMAZING. It was probably one of the more beautiful days we've had since I've been out there. Really clear visibility, flat glass calm water and no wind to be had. We even changed up the days itinerary in honor of the beautiful day! 

Pretty much every day we go to Hastings reef in the morning and a site called Breaking Patches in the afternoon... yesterday we went to reef call Saxon reef which was just absolutely gorgeous. I managed to go on a dive there as well, helping out one of our instructors with a group of introductory scuba divers. These are people that mostly have never dove before, and we take them out for an easy training dive to give them a taste for being underwater. Some people take to it really well, some people never leave the boat. But I got to tag along and help herd the intro divers on this amazing site. We had three white-tip reef sharks wandering around almost as soon as we jumped in the water. The fish life was excellent! Huge schools of red bass (snappers) and sweetlips... loads of damselfish, coral trout (groupers) and clownfish. The coral was excellent and it was a new, different site for most of the crew, so we were all stoked. Just about all the crew got to jump in for a dive, which is rather uncommon, but we only had 43 passengers on the boat, so it was a really cruisey day!  

Best of all, at this site I saw my first cuttlefish! Cuttlefish are related to squid and octopus. They're incredibly smart and charismatic animals and interacting with one, even this little shy one that we found, was amazing and a serious dream come true. My marine biology nerd sensors were off the chart! They're SUCH COOL CREATURES. 

Today was equally beautiful, weather-wise. It was a bit more stressful.. we had more people on the boat and loads of them couldn't swim. Normally we take non-swimmers out in groups of 4 or less. I took 4 out to start and somehow ended up back at the boat with about 7 people grabbing on to my life ring, one of them near panicked and none of them were very good English speakers. Despite that, it was still a really lovely day. Calm, sunny, almost no wind... really can't complain! 

Now... hopefully the weather continues in our favor. Apparently there may or may not be a cyclone heading our way. A cyclone, by the way, is just a backwards hurricane. But Wednesday is forecast to be about 35 knots which is CRAZY windy weather for boating. I'm hoping that Wednesday will be a day off, but I won't know that until tomorrow! 

Stay tuned for the possible thrilling comparison of South Florida hurricane parties to Cairns cyclone parties! 

Love and fishes! 

Working hard!

Hello friends and family and blog readers everywhere!

Life in Australia is amazing. I've been working my tail off... today was day 10 straight and I know I'm working again tomorrow, but it's all good. I like my job a lot, the people I work with are pretty awesome and even when we have a rough day from time to time, they make it entertaining at least. But really, even the rough days aren't so bad... when it comes down to it, I'm still working on a boat on the Great Barrier Reef. It's a rare day when I don't get in the water for a longish snorkel. We've had beautiful weather lately too, which makes our lives on the boat so much easier... calm weather means less seasick passengers.

One of the most rewarding parts of my job is helping people overcome their fears of water or snorkeling. It's really satisfying to talk someone into the water, lead them around on a life ring for a little while while they freak out about water getting in their snorkels and having mild panic attacks and then work with them and come back later in the afternoon and find them out in the water, swimming around with a noodle, raving about how amazing their day was.

The least rewarding part? Definitely dealing with the seasick ones.

Here's a couple of pictures, thanks to my lovely mother, who played paparazzi while she was on the boat over the holidays... so you all can see my ridiculously wonderful job.

This is what my mornings look like... cooking bacon and eggs for somewhere between 60 and 100 people

Yayyyy snorkel tourssssssss

Tough day at the office... on lookout making sure everyone's safe and happy. 

Some of our awesome crew! 

Life is good down under. Sending lots of love back home! Hope you're not freezing too much! It's sunny and warm and beautiful down here! 

Love and fishes!!