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)