Diving the Great Barrier Reef

We flew straight from Auckland to Cairns, Australia to get ready for our live-aboard diving trip! We’ve been looking forward to it for months.

Before the diving, we spent a few days in Cairns getting ready and exploring the botanic gardens. Cairns feels a bit like a strip mall, but we loved getting back to warm weather, exploring the boardwalk, and walking down the waterfront esplanade.

The night before our trip, we did a night course with Reef Teach. It was pretty neat to get a little more information on what we were actually about to see. The Great Barrier Reef is actually around 3000 separate reefs, islands and cays!

For our liveaboard trip, we decided to go with ProDive’s 3 day outer reef trip. They have a good reputation for reef sustainability, as well as overall experience, and they also provided everything (including dive computer). We were a bit nervous because we’d never been on an unguided dive before, but we had a blast! It didn’t really start out that way though… it was pretty choppy on the way over and someone puked all over Priscilla. Fun times (despite the smell, neither of us got sick). There were 25 other people on the boat and crew so we got to met some really interesting people, almost half of the people are traveling long-term.

Here’s the dive deck and one of the only pictures we took of the reef above the water!

We did 10 dives over the three days. The first half of the trip, we dove at a few different locations on Milln Reef and then spent the second half at several sites on Flynn Reef. There weren’t other boats at the dive sites, so we spent a large portion of the dives, totaling ~7 hours underwater, just the two of us without another diver in site. Incredible!

We were busy the entire time either diving, getting ready to dive, eating or sleeping. We ate a lot, diving really takes it out of you! The first day and a half was stormy and rainy. We had 5 millimeter wet suits, but it was still really chilly.

The reef is so vibrant, it sometimes felt like we were diving in an aquarium. The variety and scope of coral was simply staggering.

Oh, and turtles! Turtle here, turtle there, turtle selfie beware.
Big Pufferfish! I think it’s a Map Pufferfish. 

We had the chance to swim through a few reef tunnels, about 15-20 ft long. Only a minor scrap on my leg from an overhead rock. Here’s exiting the tunnel.Upside down ice cream cone corral that we used as a marker for underwater navigation. Also, yet another school of fish and a Unicorn fish just hanging out.Massive bump head Parrotfish.A colorful fish swimming by in shallow enough water to actually get some coloration in the picture. Most of the time, we’re too deep to get great color photos without a red light.

Came upon a turtle surfacing to breathe. They stay under for up to 20 min while awake, and for hours while asleep.

Nemo! We saw a surprising amount of anemonefish and clownfish, given that their numbers have been dwindling since Nemo came out (people collecting them off reefs for their fish tanks).

We dove at all times of the day (and a couple of nights). We started one dive before the sun came up and then surfaced to a beautiful sunrise. These early morning dives were our favorite as there was so much fish activity on the reef at that time of day.

We also did two night dives! The first guided and the second unguided. We found a cuttlefish swimming along, they’re bigger than I expected! We also saw a big nurse shark, barracuda, turtle, a parrotfish sleeping in its mucus bubble, and red snappers that cleverly use divers’ lights to hunt the fish that we shine our lights on. Also, on the unguided dive we managed to get lost, which added some excitement.

Highlights of the Great Barrier Reef and Cairns:

• In Cairns, the botanic gardens and esplanade were our favorites
• Meeting a lot of interesting people on the liveaboard.
• I don’t really sign on to the idea of a “bucketlist”, but if I did… check

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