Our boat left Cairns Harbour just after 8am yesterday morning. Foley and I were in a good mood and the weather was looking promising compared with previous days. Steve wasn’t joining us for the day - he was too busy throwing himself out of a plane at 14,000ft.
We cruised towards Green Island and as we got there any clouds there were disappeared suddenly and it was a beautiful day. Quite a few people, Foley included, were doing introductory dives. This is what you can do if you haven’t taken a diving course before and want to have a go at scuba. The dive instructor takes you down to a maximum of about 5-8 metres and stays with you, showing you around a bit and making sure you’re okay. There were just three certified divers on board: Becky and Charlie, two girls from Kingston, and me. One of the boat crew was learning his Dive Master PADI course so instead of us checking and fitting all our gear ourselves he had the job of doing it for us as part of his training. Ready to go, we ‘giant-leaped’ off the boat and headed down. There were some big fish just beneath the boat but we didn’t stay around there for long. The site is called Pinnacle Reef and it’s quite shallow so we never got deeper than around 10 metres. As it happens it’s not the best time of year to dive the Barrier Reef, because of weather conditions and other similar factors, and the visibility was an average 10 metres. My first dive at 11am was for 40 minutes, descending 8 metres, water temperature 26 degrees. It was a fun dive and I had no problems with my mask like in the past. There was an abundance of marine life, we saw clown fish and a couple of Blue Spotted Lagoon rays trying to hide themselves in the sand, darting off as we got near.
We came up and had lunch then the skipper took us over to the island in the motorised dingy where I had an hour to kill until my second dive. I met back up with Foley who’d just sampled the experience of being a fish himself with the other intro divers. He loved it as expected. On Green Island we went inland to a crocodile park called Marineland Melanesia - home of, wait for it, the world’s largest captive saltwater crocodile. Cassius, weighing in at 1,600lbs, is a monsterous 5.5m in length. He hardly ever comes out of his pond unfortunately but his head was sticking out so I got a photo. At 1.30pm I was picked up from the island and taken back to the boat to gear up for dive #2. The girls weren’t coming this time beacuse their ears were hurting slightly from the first dive. Instead, I went down with Bones, dive leader, and Luke the guy learning his Dive Master. It was a superb dive, definitely one of my favourite so far. We went a couple of metres deeper this time and were down for 45 minutes. Saw starfish, three types of clown fish (Nemo), bizarre sea cucumbers and found a Branching Anome (sp?). It’s a plant growth out of the sand that when you touch it it shoots back into a hole in the ground faster than your eye can follow it. Gazing around a tall clump of reef we bumped into a Green turtle. Bones showed me how you can reach down and rub the sand off of it’s shell. Not long after we saw another turtle. This time it was a huge Hawksbille. Bones told me later it’s one of the largest you’ll ever see. It must have been a metre in diametre. I passed Bones my underwater camera and swam round behind the resting turtle. I started to rub the sand off it’s shell like I did with the Green turtle and he started to stir and made a move. I hovered above him and held on to his shell as he swam off while Bones took a picture. That one had better come out. Before the dive was over we found a Tassled Wobbegong shark hiding in the coral.
Luke remarked it was his best dive yet; and we were all well pleased with the day’s diving. All that was left of the afternoon was to sail back home to Cairns and enjoy the complimentary wine, cheese and biscuits. Bonzer!
Today is a fantastic day. It’s been scorching and we’ve all been relaxing at the pool of one of the other hotels in Cairns. If this is winter up here, I can’t imagine what it must be like in the middle of summer. Tomorrow we fly with Jetstar back to Brisbane, where I’ll do all the necessary preparation for my flight to New Zealand next week.