Dive Madness, Day Two :)

My initial fear about older and superior divers not liking me were firmly dispelled almost immediately; everyone was SO very friendly (and I started observing people right away and literally taking notes so I could remember everything). I'm pretty terrible at remembering people's names, but I did my absolute best because everyone was so nice and friendly and I wanted to know and remember them all.     

My lovely fellow passengers :)

After this trip, I realize how fortunate I have been to get the chance to dive in such pristinely superb locations, with some even cooler divers. Gwen and Troy, an Irish/Australian married couple from Sydney were great fun, as were Martijn and Nicole (originally from Eastern Europe somewhere, but now current residents of Australia). Paul and his 16-year-old son Justin live in Sydney, and were quite fun to chat with. John and Jane Winters (who wore Hawaiian shirts a lot), and their grown son John (all from Wisconsin) were excellent additions to the jovial bunch, and documentarian David Ireland and his cameraman Grant told some RIDICULOUS (and often mildly inappropriate) jokes. Tor was a very tall amateur photographer (who took excellent pictures) from Norway and Andre was a friendly and bald man (with cool tattoos) from Holland. Sascha and Aaron were both from Australia. Rayna had worked for Mike Ball previously, but she and her mother, Faye were just passengers on this voyage. Faye had awesomely colored slouchy beach pants. My dive buddy was a pleasant German woman named Suzanne who was on holiday from work. She was a good person for me to dive with because neither of us particularly wanted to go super deep or super far, so we had nice relaxing dives (except for the one where I almost ran out of air, but that's another story). Also, her reluctance to lead dives (she wasn't that good with a compass) allowed me to work on my navigation skills and take charge of leading our dives. I never got us lost once :D     

Potato Cod

  After our 7AM breakfast, our first dive was at Cod Hole. The water temperature was a pleasant 83 degrees Fahrenheit, the visibility was about 30-40 feet, and our average depth was 26 feet. We had Shea, one of the instructors, lead our dive so we could get used to the site. The best thing about this dive was seeing the potato cod: giant mottled fish (1.5 meters long) who were not remotely afraid of people whatsoever. I got courted by one who followed me around the whole dive and swam all the way back to the boat with me! Courted by a cod :) Other cool things I saw were Moorish Idols (Gil from Finding Nemo), Clownfish, Zebrafish, White-tip Reef Sharks, these little fish that looked like white fish dipped in black paint, and too many corals and sponges to name. This was my first real dive on the reef (excluding my first dive I did on the day trip which was really more of a dive to get used to using my new gear) and it was ASTOUNDINGLY wonderful.       

Blue Christmas Tree worms. They live on coral and retract like the large plants in Avatar (these are what those plants were based on, but these ones are barely an inch high).

After an hour of surface interval time, we headed back into the water (after wriggling and squeezing ourselves back into already wet wetsuits--an attractive process for everyone). On this dive, we saw an Undulated Moray Eel, Trumpetfish, Pipefish, White-tip Reef Sharks, Peacock Grouper, a Bull Shark (!!!!), Squirrelfish, Christmas Tree Worms, and, of course, the Potato Cod. Suzanne didn't want to lead this dive, so I stepped up to the plate and reluctantly did. I was super OCD about checking my compass every few minutes--I'd never led a dive by myself before, other than swimming in a 30m x 30m square with Dan for my navigation dive for my Advanced Open Water certification. When we were nearing the end of the dive, I began to panic because we should have been back at the boat and I didn't think we were anywhere close to it. Then I looked up. We were directly under it. Navigation win :D I grinned throughout our three minute safety stop. I need to stop being so excited underwater because grinning with a regulator in makes seawater leak into both your mouth and your mask.

Sand goby in his hole

  We motored off to Challenger Bay while eating a delicious lunch (the food alone would have made the trip worth it). Diving here, I saw a free-swimming (not hiding in the coral) Moray Eel! They are HUGE! We saw three cuttlefish, which are one of my top three favorite underwater creatures (the other two being nudibranchs and Christmas Tree worms). We hovered and watched the cuttlefish for a while; they are quite mesmerizing. We also saw sand gobies and their crab roommates. They have a super cool relationship: the tiny little translucent crab digs a hole while the goby keeps watch, then when danger comes around, they both dart into the hole for safety. Sand keep getting in the hole, so the crab just digs it out again. It was fascinating to watch, even though they are both so small.    

Giant Trevally. They have a lot of teeth.

  We stayed at Challenger Bay for our night dive. First of all, everyone should go on night dives, they are AMAZING! We tied glow sticks to our tanks so that we could all see each other, and we had our dive lights as well, so we could see where we were going. The highlight (although it got annoying after a while) was that groups of Giant Trevally would use our dive lights to hunt by. It's quite resourceful of them, actually, but you'd be looking at some cool little fish and then BAM a three foot long fish would shoot past you and eat it. After a while, we got good at diverting them with our lights so they wouldn't eat everything we were trying to look at.      We had an excellent dinner and all chatted about the fantastical things we saw that day. Four dives in a day is exhausting, and everyone had gone to bed before 9pm, myself included. We motored through the night and we were crossing a patch of open water not protected by the reef, so it was pretty rough and choppy, but I managed to get some sleep.  

Dive Madness, Day One :)

All the nitrogen has been safely off-gassed from my body. All my SCUBA gear is dry. I have my land legs almost completely back (occasionally I still get the feeling that I'm on a boat, particularly when I am sitting still in a small-ish room). And now, I will tell you all about my dive trip!

The Mike Ball Dive Expedition office is just outside of the main area of downtown Cairns, and I dropped my luggage (meaning my giant orange duffel bag full of mostly scuba gear and a few pieces of clothing) off there and checked in around 3:30pm. I then had about two hours to kill before boarding, so I mooched around Cairns for a bit, and went to P.J. O'Brien's (an Irish pub) for dinner. They have quite decent $10 meals which include a small mug of beer. (Also, unrelatedly, a picture of Oscar Wilde is painted on one wall, but he TOTALLY just looks like Snape and I was all, "Why is there a painting of Severus Snape on the wall of an Irish Pub in Cairns" and then I saw the quote painted next to it by Oscar Wilde and thusly realized it wasn't actually Snape).

Walking up to Spoilsport

We were instructed to meet near the pier at 6PM and slowly everyone congregated there and began introducing themselves. My initial fears about not being friends with anyone on the boat were quickly banished as everyone was very friendly. Then two of the Mike Ball Dive Expedition crew members walked up and introduced themselves and immediately started learning our names (with compulsory nametag wearing, of course). They walked us over to the boat, which was named Spoilsport, and I was pleasantly surprised before even getting on board: it was very nice.

This was taken from the doorway. Tiny!

Once all of us were on board, we were directed to our rooms where our luggage had already been delivered (it was like being at Hogwarts!). My room was roughly 8 feet square with a bunkbed, set of drawers, cabinet/closet, bedside table, and air conditioner. The sheets and bedspreads had a cute seahorse and seashell pattern on them AND we got a freshly made bed and a pillow mint every morning! My room was a double occupancy room, but I had it all to myself and I was very glad of that. It meant that I got the bottom bunk, two pillows, two towels, more tiny bars of soap than I'd ever care to use, and best of all: privacy. Not that I wouldn't have LOVED sharing a closet-sized room with a complete stranger for four days...We were then asked to come upstairs where we got the welcome talk and the safety talk, along with complimentary champagne (yes, it told me how nice I looked, Dad, ha ha ha). Then we got introduced to the crew.

The bald captain's name was Pete and he frequently wore a pirate bandana and always wore his silver hoop earring with a piece of shell on it. Yes, he was pretty much a pirate all the time. The first mate was Leigh, who's shoulder length brown hair and mustache were both streaked with blonde from the sun (but don't worry, his mustache wasn't shoulder length. That'd be really creepy). He was rather shy, but very nice and could play the harmonica and sing quite well. The trip director was a pleasant Scottish man named Craig and he kept everyone organized and on time during the trip. Andrea was the chef in training and he was from Italy. Anita was the pleasant German hostess who was excellent at remembering and using everyone's names. Gus was a tall, SUPER freckly ginger man who has never lived in one place for more than three years. Shay was a short and nice dive instructor who is also an excellent photographer and guitar player; he and Gus were the first two crew members we met. The boat's engineer reminded me of a tiny little hermit crab, but I never learned his name. The main chef was another ginger (although he had hair more my color) and he had many crazy tribal tattoos, and I think his name was Karl. The boat's photographer/videographer was an American named Lawrence, who was nice and very good at photography, but always seemed a wee bit butt-hurt/disgruntled about something or another most of the time. Then there were two volunteers: Patrik, from Switzerland, helped out in the kitchen, and Philippe, a French Canadian, was a general helper. All the crew were dive certified, and most of them were also certified Divemasters or Dive Instructors. Everyone was exceedingly pleasant and helpful and seemed genuinely happy to have all of us passengers along.

View of half the dive deck

After all our meetings were done, we were each assigned a dive station out on the dive deck and we set up all our gear for the morning. Almost everyone had gone to bed by 9:30pm (which makes sense, given that breakfast was at 7am and we had a full day of diving ahead of us), which left the dive deck deserted, and an excellent place to journal. It was the perfect temperature outside, not warm, but not cold, with just the slightest hint of a breeze, and it made me smile how at home I felt on this boat.

My dive station! :)

I'm doing my best to split these dive posts up by day, so that's all for this one.

Up next: meeting my fellow passengers and hearing about our first day of diving :)

If you'd like to see all my pictures from this trip, click HERE to go to my Facebook album.
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Song of the day: If It's Love by Train

Swimming in a giant fish tank

Scuba diving is one of my favorite things in the world.

Yesterday, I got to dive on this side of the Pacific Ocean for the first time.

After schlepping my 35 pounds of scuba gear all the way here from Oregon, I am bound and determined to use it as much as physically (and monetarily) possible. So last week I signed up for a day diving trip through Ocean Spirit Cruises, one of the many dive companies in the greater Cairns area. I got a student deal through my school, and then they upgraded me for free (a $60 deal) when bad weather forced the trip to get rescheduled.

Check in was at the boat at 7:45AM, which meant that I had to wake up at 5:30AM in order to catch the 6:25AM bus that got me into Cairns at 7:00AM, which gave me enough time for breakfast and coffee before lugging all my gear in my bright orange duffel bag seven blocks down to Pier A, where Ocean Spirit I was docked. I was expecting a nice medium-sized dive boat that held about 20-30 divers, but no. This boat was HUGE.

The front half of the boat

I checked in and boarded the large boat in the stunning sunshine. Once all the passengers had arrived, there was probably around 75-100 people on board, including the crew (I'm super bad at estimating, but there were LOTS). I (obviously) started taking pictures immediately.

We had a safety briefing once we had headed away from the marina and towards our destination of Michaelmas Cay. The crew member doing the safety talk was a pleasant Australian named Matt and he was the boat biologist. One of the emergencies he covered was the worst kind to Australians: running out of cold beer. We all chuckled appropriately at that. After the briefing, we were free to lounge about as the boat motored 40km out to our diving and snorkeling spot. (Not everyone on this trip was diving; most of the people were just snorkeling, with about 25 people actually going scuba diving.)

At 9:30, there was a slideshow/presentation in the saloon (that's just what they called the main cabin area for passengers, but I felt a little like a cowboy anyway). One of the crew members, a friendly and smart guy named Cane was giving a talk about the history of the reef and the kinds of fish and plants we'd be seeing on our dives (I know his name is probably spelled Cain, but I'm spelling it this way because it makes me think more of sugar cane, and less "I'm going to kill my brother by hitting him in the head with a rock.") He good-naturedly made fun of me for taking notes, but I just found everything super fascinating and wanted to make sure I remembered everything (like how the reef is 10,000 years old and you can see it from outer space, or that it extends 2,400km down the coast of Queensland, or that there are 20,000 nesting seabirds on the cay we are going to and you will have to pay a $9,000 fine if you go outside the roped area, or how there are 360 different species of coral in the Great Barrier Reef). I probably looked ridiculous because I kept grinning at all the cool facts he was telling us, but I couldn't help it, I was just SO EXCITED TO FINALLY BE HERE AND ABOUT TO DIVE!

Next, we had our dive briefing and found out when we'd be diving (we had to go in shifts to make sure there were enough divemasters/instructors with us at all times). I was scheduled for a dive at 1:15, and it was just before 11am, so I went out on the semi-submersible tour. Steered just like a boat, a semi-sub is just like what it sounds like: a water vehicle that is half submerged in the water. Cane was leading the tour of this as well, and he got to fill our heads with even more information about the native wildlife that lives on this mid-shelf platform reef. He started off by telling us that this was the best day, weather-wise, that they've had in over a month, which made me pleased.

White-tip Reef Shark. Derp.

Peering through the windows of the semi-sub that were 1.8 meters underwater, we saw lots of super cool things, the coolest being five White-tip Reef sharks circling (probably around an injured fish or something), a Green Sea Turtle, and a Manta Ray that was 2.5 meters across! Cane said that he'd never seen a manta ray while doing one of these tours before, so we were super lucky to have seen it. Again, I couldn't keep myself from grinning; THIS WAS SO FREAKING AWESOME! After 30 minutes, we headed back to the boat. Lunchtime!

After lunch, I reapplied my SPF 55 and got the nice lady from Switzerland I met earlier to put some on my back for me; Daniella and I were sunscreen buddies :) Finally, my dive time rolled around, and I donned my stinger suit (a very thin wetsuit to protect your skin from jellyfish stings--a wise choice in this area) and started getting my gear together. Even though I'd gotten my gear as a Christmas present this year (from my favorite dive shop, Salem Scuba!), I hadn't had a chance to use any of it yet (silly giant tonsils needing immediate extraction, rude of them). So this was my first dive using all my own gear and I was very excited.
 There were 12 people heading out in the small boat to a dive site just a short way away, so we all piled our gear into the boat and then piled ourselves in as well. At the large orange buoy that marked our dive site, we all started to gear up, and one by one, we fell backward over the side of the boat and into the water (my first boat dive!) I was in a group with two other certified divers and our divemaster, and we descended to Coral Gardens, about 10 meters below us.

Black and white nudibranch

The water temperature was 79 degrees Fahrenheit and the visibility was about 26 feet. I saw a White-Tip Reef Shark (don't worry Mom, it was only about 3 feet long and super scared of us), a black and white nudibranch (nudibranchs are my favorite!), a large sea cucumber with its guts out, and many Giant Trevally, Spangled Emperor, Humbugs, and Tiera Batfish. And those are just the species I recognized! (I really need to invest in a fish ID book for this area.) I felt like I was swimming in a giant tropical fish tank, and I had expected all the fish to be about the size of fish in a large fish tank (I'm not quite sure why). Not so. The round Tiera Batfish looked similar to a yellow angelfish, but were about a foot across! Even underwater, I was grinning, but that made seawater leak around my regulator and into my mouth, so I tried to suppress my smiling as to breathe in only air.

After a pleasant 35 minute dive, we surfaced and de-geared in the boat. Once all 12 of us were back on the boat, we motored back to the big boat and cleaned off our gear. Everyone who has used a stinger suit had left them in a big wet pile near the back of the boat, and Cane had sat down and was turning them all right side out and putting them back on hangers. I sat down to help him and asked him lots of (probably annoying) questions about how he landed such a sweet job like this (because getting to scuba dive all day and tell people about awesome marine life and getting PAID for it would be an ideal job for me) and where his favorite dive site was and what the coolest creature he's ever seen. He was very helpful and answered all my questions without throwing me overboard for being irritating.

We pulled back into the dock at Cairns around 5pm and the crew all got off first and then stood there in a line on the dock in their cute little navy and white striped polo shirts, thanking us as we walked down the stairs and off the boat. I thanked them all profusely for a wonderful day, my grin pretty much a permanent fixture. Hoisting my (now wet and thus heavier) gear, I trekked back to the bus stop and waited for the 2A to take me back home to the Lodge. I was exhausted (but not at all sunburned!) and sore, but SO very happy :) I love scuba diving, and now I can't wait for my next dive trip, which is a 4-night live-aboard trip out to the reef north of Cairns. Yay!

If you'd like to check out the rest of my pictures, click HERE to go to my Facebook album.

*Edit: I found out his name is spelled Kain. My bad.*
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Song of the day: Change of Seasons by Sweet Thing
(the first 30 seconds are weird, but then the song starts and I love it)

Happy

Ladies and gentlemen, this will be my shortest blog post ever (I promise), but I just wanted to write these very few words extolling how FANTASTIC the Australian Postal Service is: eight days from Portland to Cairns. Gloriously wonderful.

I love snail mail.


And now I'm off to go dance in the sunshine :)

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Song of the day: Sing My Lonesome Away by Matt Wertz

The wheels on the bus

Just the other day, I was sitting at the bus stop right outside the Student Lodge, a cool breeze on my face, I realized how much I enjoy riding the bus. Yes, it sometimes is frustrating to have to plan out my day based on when the buses run. But waiting at hot bus stops, sitting in blue and turquoise and navy patterned bus seats, and walking between bus stops and where I need to go--all of these actions give me more time to think. Instead of jumping in my car, turning on the radio, and getting to my destination exactly when I want to, exactly when I was planning, I have to wait. And that waiting is good for me. I can often be very impatient, and this is helping me to slow down and not be so antsy and uptight about things, especially involving being "on time" to things. I may want to get into Cairns at a specific time, but I will simply get there whenever the bus does, and I have no control over that.

I could just put in my iPod headphones and tune everyone out with my music, but I have this hope that by not wearing earbuds and staring vacantly out the window (like half the people on the bus do), by looking people in the eye and smiling, that people will be more likely to interact with me, to sit down and talk to me. And if not, that's fine, I'm still being a much more active participant in my environment than they are. And without music, my thoughts are free to somersault around in my head as much as they please :)

I have thought of 13 different subjects for future blog posts. I have imagined exactly what I would say and do if I ever met Aragorn, son of Arathorn (and I know this is the 2nd blog post in a row in which I've referred to Lord of the Rings, but I swear I'm not obsessed with it, really,  I've just watched it recently. Twice). I have identified that my biggest pet peeve here is that my bath towel is always wet (it never fully dries unless I spread it out in the sun). I have deeply pondered the surliness of most Sun Bus Transport bus drivers. I have composed postcards to friends back home in my head. I have brainstormed some spring break travel ideas. I have thought about which two artists I am going to compare in my art review for my Art, Artist, Environment class. I've daydreamed about the luxurious and over-extravagant trips I would take around Australia if I was a multi-millionaire. I have people-watched and made up stories and names for my fellow bus-travelers.

I love riding the bus :)

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Song of the day: The Fox (cover) by Nickel Creek

Sweating and more sweating

Yesterday, I went hiking with my friends Katie, Amanda, and Sam. We caught the bus to the Cairns Botanical Gardens and started walking up the Blue Arrow trail that starts behind the gardens. I don't know how hot it actually was, but I started sweating almost immediately, despite the tree cover over most of the trail. The Blue Arrow trail is about 8km round trip (which is a little under 5 miles) and it was very steep and switchback-y in parts. I am not in the best of shape, and this hike was hard.

I felt like two different Lord of the Rings characters at various points on the hike: Samwise Gamgee when he loses sight of Frodo around the bend when they're just starting their journey, about to leave The Shire, and almost has an epic freakout; and Gimli the dwarf when he, Aragorn, and Legolas are running across Middle Earth to rescue Merry and Pippin from the Uruk-hai, and he is panting and falling over and getting left behind his fitter counterparts. But I didn't get lost or left behind, and the four of us survived the hike with little more than a few bug bites and mud streaked legs and feet.

And my legs were complaining like Pippin when he realized that Aragorn didn't know about second breakfast, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner, or supper. My right knee (that I kinda messed up pushing our stuck van off a beach in Mexico, and again climbing into a volcano in Lee Vining, CA) was bugging me, as it tends to do when I overexert it. I'm glad I brought me knee brace thing with me here. Also, I felt super healthy after completing my hike, and somehow I always forget that I love hiking, even when it is a hard trail. Oh, and I also felt like I was on LOST because we were right across the street from the airport and could hear planes loudly taking off quite frequently. Hearing loud jets while hiking through a tropical rainforest just made me feel like I was following Jack as he led the group on a hike to the radio tower to use the satellite phone to call the freighter to be rescued (except the freighter wasn't there to rescue the Losties. Anyway.....)

Today, Katie told me about Zumba in the park, which happens outside at (you guessed it) a park in downtown Cairns every Tuesday and Friday evening. And it is FREE (classes normally cost about $15 per class), so we headed into Cairns on the bus.

Called "exercise in disguise," Zumba is a crazy, latin-inspired, high-energy dance workout to super upbeat music, most of it designed or adapted specifically for Zumba. If you've never tried it, I strongly encourage you to. I was skeptical at first, because I don't really enjoy dancing in public and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I decided to just go for it, and I'm SO glad I did!

Before the class started, I warned my friends that I was about to make a huge fool of myself. I needn't have worried: over half the people there looked more ridiculous than I did (hopefully) and most people didn't know what they were doing, but they were doing it anyway. No one just stands around and makes fun of people; the instructors tell everyone who walks by/lurks around watching to just join in, because anyone can do Zumba. I saw a 3 year old girl there with her mom and a 65+ year old man, and everyone else in between. And let me tell you, you haven't really lived until you've seen a 65 year old man in a singlet and short shorts shimmying to a Shakira song.

When I woke up this morning, I didn't think that I'd be doing a sweaty dance workout in a park in Cairns with 200 other people, but that's just what happened.


I can't wait until next Tuesday :)

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Song of the day: Waka Waka (This Time For Africa) by Shakira

Meat pies and a muddy river

My friend Peter drives a ute.

Affectionately named "car-truck" by yours truely as a child (and a "pickup-pickup" by my dad when he was a kid), these odd vehicles were a rare sight growing up in the Pacific Northwest. I don't know if Americans have a real name for them, but in Australia, they are called utes (short for utility vehicle, I'm guessing).

They are EVERYWHERE.
And they look like this:

But Peter's is white, not this vomitous mucusy green-yellow atrociousness.

Anyway, we had made plans to venture to this bakery in Gordonville (a town on the other side of Cairns, about half an hour away) because Peter had discovered that I had never had an Australian meat pie. This was the best place to get them, according to him, and as he grew up in Queensland, I trust his judgment on local baked goods. So we arrived at Pie-fection Bakery on the main strip of this 4,500 person town and walked into meat pie heaven. There were SO MANY kinds to choose from. They had meats ranging from chicken to lamb, not to mention various kinds of beef (I don't know what all the different cuts mean, clearly I'm still a vegetarian in my head), paired with different vegetables (if desired)--potatoes, carrots, shallots, etc.-- and gravy. I ordered a chicken and shallot one, and got a carton of chocolate milk to go with it. We got our still-warm pies and chilly beverages and went to a table outside.

With a brief wish I had brought my camera as to document this momentous occasion, Peter and I said "cheers" and dug in.

MAGICAL DELICIOUSNESS. Oh my goodness, it was EXACTLY what I had imagined meat pies to taste like, and it was just what I wanted. So damn tasty. I wish this place was closer to where I live, but it is probably a good thing that it isn't, otherwise I'd have to buy two seats on the plane ride back to carry my giant pie-fattened girth back to the states. But I will be back to this pie place.

After thoroughly enjoying our pies, we headed back to the ute and back towards Smithfield. We made a pit stop at the Barron Gorge Hydro Plant. Driving in on a narrow road cut into the side of a very green and rocky mountain, I was amazed at how beautiful everything was, and cursed myself again for not bringing my camera (oh, it's raining, you won't be taking pictures and of COURSE the weather won't change into sunny gorgeousness or anything *grumble*). We got out and walked across the bridge over the frothy brown Barron River. Because of all the rain, the river was quite full and surging, and the "No diving, jumping, abseiling, or swimming" signs on the bridge seemed to make a lot of sense.

Everything here was beautiful.

The big green mountain was close enough to touch.

The sunshine was warm on my hair.

I saw a big Ulysses Butterfly, which look like this:

They are unique to the World Heritage Rainforests of Far North Queensland, and they are quite large and incredibly incandescent.

All the rain also greatly increased the flow of this waterfall, which apparently is quite small normally:

On our way back, we stopped at this very cheap (but legit) meat warehouse and Pete bought a bunch of steaks and mince (ground beef) for him and his roommates to eat this month. I entertained myself by looking at funny names of cuts of meat: bulk thick pork, fatback, rump, Boston butt, chuck arm. Good times. Then we voyaged back to the Student Lodge.

All in all, it was an excellent day :)

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Song of the Day: Toes by the Zac Brown Band