Still working on getting my land legs sorted out, but I've successfully added two more certifications to my trip: Open Water Diver and Adventure Diver! The three day trip out to the Great Barrier Reef was amazing. Not necessarily relaxing, but it certainly wasn't short on adventure. It's been very windy in Cairns for the last week (and continued during our trip), which makes the water very choppy, especially on the way out to the reef. Day 1 started with a 3.5 hour ride out and at least 60% of our group (about 35 divers) made a personal contribution to the ocean. The rest of us sat still in the back of the boat, grim faced, doing anything possible to help keep our stomaches where they belong and to avoid hearing the constant sounds of the less fortunate or see the parade of sea-sick bags dropping from the second level into the sea. Not exactly the highlight of the trip.
Once we set up at the reef, though, the waves were much more manageable. And the diving was beautiful. Our first two dives were open water certification dives so we'd drop down to 10 - 14 meters and do drills like taking our mask off and on, removing our regulator, and getting our buoyancy correct in the water. Everything went pretty smoothly except during a mask clearing exercise (getting sea water out of your mask) when one guy accidentally spit his regulator out (which is okay) but instead of reaching for his secondary air suplly he grabbed his snorkel mouthpiece. Obviously the snorkel isn't going to do much good at 13 meters, but fortunately our instructor was right next to him and got the regulator back in before the guy attempted breathing through his snorkel.
It was at that point that I realized how stressful being a diver instructor actually is. Diving the Great Barrier Reef 3 - 5 days a week sounds like a pretty fun job, but when you're in the middle of the ocean, 30 feet below the surface, in charge of 8 to 10 people who've never dived before, "relaxing" can turn to "panicking" in a split second, at any split second. Our instructor was a lot of fun, but you could tell that he was keeping a close eye on us the entire time we were under the water. His job was definitely not as relaxing as I had imagined.
Anyway, we were officially certified as open water divers on the second morning and were able to do our first dive without an instructor shortly after that. I felt like I had joined a club at that point, as the "real" divers (the ones who weren't doing the certification course) actually started talking to us at that point. All of a sudden we were real people in their eyes; they even helped us pull our wetsuits on and everything. :) It was a little strange being out there with just your buddy, but you quickly forget about it as you drift around the coral, staring at the hundreds of different fish (who are just as curiously staring at you). I came back from my first real dive as happy as could be.
"We saw two turtles!" I happily tell another diver.
"Cool!" he respondes, "did you see the white-tip coral shark?"
"Woah, no. That would have been great!" I tell him.
"Yeah, what about the octopus, catch a glimpse of that?"
"Oh... no, didn't see that either." I'm still happy, but not as peppy as I was 30 seconds ago.
Another diver walks over, "Did you guys see the school of 15 barracudas?"
"No..." I trail off. But then I realize, "Hey, but I saw two turtles and it was great!"
"A dive is only as much fun as the diver makes it." They smile and head upstairs. I think that was a compliment...
After our free dive we did a night dive, which is one of the strangest things I've ever done. It's absolutely surreal standing on the back of the boat when it's pitch black out, realizing that you're about to jump in with just a small flashlight (or torch, as they say down here) to light your way. I jumped in, looked down and saw a huge fish hanging out just below me (where "huge" is say 1.5 feet long). Fortunately he was as freaked out as I was and he took off. After the initial shock of basically 0 visibility, things settled down. And once under water everything was fine. It's probably the closest I'll come to space exploration, and that's just what it felt like to me. Slowly spinning around, seeing things appear from nowhere and disappear back again was strange, but fun. We didn't see too much at night, but did find a huge green turtle and we all followed it for a while. They're really graceful in the water and at night, with flashlights providing the only light in front of a pitch black stage, our turtle was mesmerizing and we floated along with him for a good 5 minutes.
The last day started with a deep dive down to 26 meters (about 85 feet) to see if anyone would get nitrogen narcosis. Going down to 26 meters doesn't really feel any different from 15, except when you look up you realize that the surface is a long, long ways away. We also brought some fun toys down to see the effects of the additional pressure and loss of color (everything starts turning to shades of blue the deeper you get). In the end no one suffered from narcosis and things went pretty smoothly. Sadly, it appears that I'm some sort of oxygen Hoover; I was going through my tank faster than anyone on all the dives. On the deep dive I ended up low enough that I needed share air on the trip back to the surface with my buddy. It wasn't stressful though, and I guess it was a good experience to actually go through a low on air experience.
Whew, I feel like I could write about this forever. I took one roll of pictures down on the reef and got maybe 2 or 3 good pictures. I'll get them up soon, along with my Sydney photos. But for now, I'm going to veg for a bit.
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