Diving the Great Barrier Reef!

I’d been keen to dive the GBR (or anywhere, really), since I’d begun planning to visit Aussie, and had decided not to take a trip in Cairns when both Suzanne and one of her friend’s had recommended that I go from Mission Beach instead, since the trip out to the reef would be shorter and the amount of people on the boat likely smaller. However it was a bit of a shock when I went to book my trip through Absolute Backpackers in Mission Beach and found out that the snorkeling plus two introductory dives would cost about three hundred bucks! But I had to go for it – it was the GBR, after all, and if I didn’t do it I knew I would regret it; maybe not until I go home, but definitely then. So I booked it, and in two days time I was ready at 8.15am for the pick-up from the Calypso Dive Company. We drove to the jetty/boat launch area and the twenty or so guests already waiting on the jetty were ferried along with us.

There were a small group of certified and would-be divers among the forty or so people on the boat. The rest had come on the trip purely to snorkel; many were families with young children. The boat ride out to the Eddy’s Reef, an hour and fifteen minutes from the mainland, was pretty rough, and the vessel was soon scattered with groaning, sleeping and quite green-looking people.

Luckily we soon arrived, and after a briefing, and some form-filling (basic safety stuff, and if-you-die-you-can’t-sue-us stuff), we got fitted with wetsuits, and the certified divers went off for their dive. Us four introductory divers wouldn’t have our turn underwater until late morning, so we went off for a snorkel with everyone else, getting our first glimpse of the gorgeous reef, teeming with life.

Finally our time for a dive came around. It turned out that I’d get a one-on-one dive with an instructor, since the ratio was supposed to be three-to-one and there were four of us. Lucky me! Mike helped me get into the heavy flotation vest and air-tank combo, gave me a final run-through on using the regulator, and then I stepped out into the water, flippers first. The first step in the water was to do some ‘skills’ while holding onto the anchor line which we would follow underwater. The first, taking the regulator out of your mouth and blowing out air, was easy as. But the second, where you have to let some water into the face mask and then blow it out by exhaling through the nose, caused a lot more problems. Thankfully, after choking on a fair amount of seawater and rushing, panicky, to the surface a few times, I got it together and we could start descending deeper than a snorkeller could. Everyone scuba-diving had been told that it was essential to keep breathing at all times underwater when diving; specifically, to not hold your breath. Maybe that seems painfully obvious, but often panic or amazement could cause people to hold their breath, and if this happened for too long the different pressures involved in being deep underwater could literally cause your lungs to explode. So that was something to think about while I was inching down the line, a little mantra going in my head as I tried to keep calm and trust the air supply…. Keep breathing. Keep breathing.

Scuba diving is incredibly odd to experience at first, at least for me. You’re underwater, yet you’re breathing easily, with almost as little thought as you would breathe on dry land. It took some getting used to, and I had been underwater a good five minutes before I accepted the fact that the air supply in my tank was highly unlikely to shut off anytime soon. Even on my second dive, the sight of another nearby group of divers floating eerily through the water jolted me away from gazing at the coral and again made me appreciate the astounding feat of even being able to breathe six or seven metres underwater, let alone also being able to glide about at whim and see the mysterious creatures that live there. The coral itself was impressive enough, all different colours, some moving into currents, some utterly still. Anenomes dotted some pieces of coral, darting back inside holes when a hand wafted through the water above them. Giant clams with mottled purple and blue lips sat majestically, clamping shut as they felt the movement of us passing by, or sensed a tasty morsel landing on them.
And there were fish, of course! Huge, bulbous lipped grey fish swimming ponderously; tiny shimmering fish like those in the huge shoal we had seen in Fiji; brightly coloured fish in blue, orange and yellow; clown fish; ‘nemo fish’ hiding into the fronds of anenomes; stripy zebra fish; and probably the prize, a lion fish, or butterfly cod.

It was a brilliant day, something so totally new and alien and fantastic to experience, like (cliched but appropriate) going for a short time through a window into another world.

written by  LizIsHere on July 4, 2010 from Mission Beach, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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