We got up at 6am on Saturday morning to get picked up and taken to the ProDive shop, where we collected our gear then drove to their boat. We had booked on for a 3 day, 2 night live aboard dive trip with a total of 11 dives.
The journey out to the reef took around 3 hours - and most of it was really choppy too! We had breakfast on the way out before it was too bad, and by the time we got there we both felt a little sick! Not as bad as some other people though!
We did our first dive as soon as we got there, on Milln Reef at a dive site called Petaj. It was a pretty good start to things - we saw a reef shark, firedart fish, goatfish, fusiliers and butterfly fish amongst tons of others that we don’t know the names of!
After lunch - which was really good - we put on our wet wetsuits and got back in the water. This time we took a camera with us. We’d hired one for the whole trip from a small company on the Esplanade in Cairns, we got a Canon G10 which is a really good camera. We managed to see another reef shark, unicorn fish, and again tons of little things and others that we never know the names of!
We had a snack and the boat moved to a new dive site, The Whale, then it was back in the water for dive number 3! By this time our fins were already starting to rub on our feet a little at the back and they were quite sore. We saw a trumpet fish, loads of cuttle fish and our first green turtle! We got a load of really good photos since I fiddled with the settings a bit to make them less blurry!
After dinner which was chicken curry, and again very good and plentiful, we did our first night dive. You often see a completely different set of fish during the night, but we were pretty unlucky on this first one. We were guided by an instructor since we’d never done one before but the visibility wasn’t great and all we really saw was a huge shrimp, a lion fish and tons of red bass, which the instructor called the “rats of the sea”. It was quite an eerie experience to be diving in pitch darkness - there wasn’t even any moonlight meaning it would be very easy to get disorientated.
We slept well that night after a day doing 4 dives! The next morning we were up early again too, at 7am. We were in our cold, wet wetsuits again by half past and diving a different part of the same dive site. We rounded a huge ‘bommie’ (section of coral reef) and saw a ray, trumpet fish, unicorn fish and cleaner wrasse cleaning the inside of fusiliers mouths! On the way back we managed to find an enormous Gorgonian fan, a very impressive type of coral.
They moved the boat again while we had breakfast to a new reef Flynn Reef at the ‘Tennis Courts’ dive site, then we did dive number 6. Under the boat we saw Thumper, the enormous maori wrasse that follows the boat around in this area. He’s incredibly friendly because he’s been fed by humans too much so comes up close for photos! We also saw some huge giant clams, probably nearly a metre across, and a porcupine puffer fish.
The boat moved again over lunch to Gordon’s Mooring. We did a day dive, then after dinner we did a night dive. We opted to go with an instructor again, so we don’t get lost and also because one of the instructors was really good at finding things to look at. He didn’t disappoint, finding us two enormous green turtles called Neville and Brian. They must have both been over two metres long (although it’s really hard to judge underwater). We also saw a couple of crabs, nudibranchs and giant trevalli.
We slept very well again, and were woken at 5.45 to do dive number 9! It took a lot of will power to get up at that time and put on a cold wetsuit and our fins which by now were rubbing both our feet raw. This was probably our best dive by a long way. On our way out we saw a school of bumphead parrotfish sleeping over a small bommie, then 2 white tipped reef sharks and a green turtle! Thumper was still hanging around the boat too for photos with Bex.
We moved again over breakfast to “Coral Gardens”, an area with a steep coral wall and a very pretty large area of coral. Thumper followed us here, and we saw another green turtle and some great barrier anenome fish (a bit like Nemo).
Our final dive was at the same site, and we saw more turtles, a couple of types of puffer fish and all sorts of other things. We then headed back to Cairns and were there, 3 hours later at about half 3.
We both really enjoyed the trip but won’t be sorry to have a short break from diving! Our feet will take a little while to recover from the rubbing fins. We got lots of good pictures which I’ll try and upload soon!
