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Tamie Poepping Australia |
Cairns & the Great Barrier Reef
Scuba Diving on the Great Barrier Reef
Carolyn and I headed out on a 3-day/2-night live-aboard excursion on a dive boat with Cairns Dive Centre. We did 10 dives including 2 night dives and saw an amazing number and variety of sea life, including white-tipped reef sharks, green sea turtles, sting rays, parrot fish, and clownfish (aka Nemo). One sea turtle had an obvious "bite" missing from his shell presumably due to a shark.
The diveboat Kangaroo Explorer
It took a few hours on a high speed boat to get us out to the diveboat, the Kangaroo Explorer. We had a great dive staff from CDC (Thanks Laura, Glen, John, Chris, Brett, Hayden, Jo, and Owen), and met alot of other people while living aboard the boat. While some people were busy taking courses, the rest of us were just doing 'fun' dives. We were exposed to a whole new world of wildlife -- some more exposed than others thanks to the 'moon' light.
Dive Group
We especially had a fun time diving with a great group of divers that were on the boat for the first half of our trip.
Tamie & Carolyn (aka "Hey Canada"), Heather (Scotland), Khaled & Tarek (England), Ryley & Derek (Utah), Paul (Holland), Caroline (& Tracey behind camera)(England).
Dive, dive, dive
No need to pack much for the diveboat. We basically lived in our bikinis and sarongs, sometimes with as little as 45 min between consecutive dives. Always jumped into our sexy 'stinger suits' before a dive, to avoid jellyfish stings. On one particular dive, we came up to the surface after our dive and had to dodge some 2-3cm jellyfish on the swim back to the boat. We had heard a frightening story about a diver from a few days prior who had a large swollen ear from a jellyfish sting.
Rick and Janet Join the Dive Boat
Fellow Canadians and Gypsy Journalists, who we met in Cairns and told us about this great website (check out their travel journal at gypsy = wherearejanetandrick), joined the dive boat on our last day. Looking forward to meeting up with them back in Toronto one day.
Back ashore in Cairns
When we got off the diveboat, we met up with some of the Number 1 Dive Group and the Cairns Dive Centre crew back in Cairns.
We then headed out around midnight on the overnight bus (10+ hours) to Airlie Beach for our next adventure.
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