Coral Sea

So after a day of learning my basic skills in the swimming pool it was time to get out on the boat and give it a go in the ocean!

The day started off early with a walk down to the dock at 6:15 am for a 6:30 departure, that time in the morning all of the bats were just getting settled back into the trees after a night out foraging and doing whatever big ass fruit bats do at night. To those of you that haven’t been to Australia you might be surprised to hear about how many bats live over here, even in Sydney you get quite a few but up north the trees are absolutely stuffed with them during the days and if you’re out and about as the sun goes down you will be treated to the sight of them all taking flight to go do batty type stuff. There are hundreds if not thousands oh and by the way “It is one of the largest bat species in the world, and has a wingspan of more than 1 m”!!

I got down to the boat and met up with Michelle (my instructor from the day before), Brett (Californian Marine Biologist and Photographer) and the captain… who I’m pretty sure was called Pete (Australian, Ex Navy Mechanic) and after a quick coffee and brief introductions to the rest of the group we were on our way. The ABC dive boat is a really nice but small boat so there were only 10 of us total Including the crew. (A dad and his 2 kids who were out to snorkel the reef, a young couple from Sydney and the delightful Jess who I was destined to spend a night on the town with but didn’t get to talking to until after the diving was done for the day)

Little but important sidebar here, Michelle is an English Girl about my age and after a bit of talking we discovered that we were both big rugby fans. I went on to tell her my rugby story, if we’ve ever talked about rugby you’ve heard it… My first proper rugby game that I was allowed to go to on my own, when I was about 13/14 and I took a load of mates, boys and girls to watch the cup final between Newcastle (my team and a good few hundred miles from the ground) and Harlequins (based a few hundred meters away from Twickenham where the final was held), so needless to the 75,000 seat crowd was 85%+ Opposition fans and all I knew at this point of my life was football fans, riots and pitch invasions from the news. With no time left on the clock Johnny Wilkinson scores a try for Newcastle in the corner right in front of me and then goes on to kick the conversion winning the cup! I am understandably going mental, jumping, shouting, cheering, when one of the 6’3” brick out house harlequins fans in the row behind me puts a mitt on my shoulder… at this moment I’m anticipating getting seven shades kicked out of me and I turn around very slowly to look up… way up… at the man behind me who’s teams defeat I was celebrating quite enthusiastically only seconds earlier. He looks down at me straight in the eye and then offers a huge grin and a huge hand for me to shake and says “wow, what a game!”…. that was when I fell in love with rugby and its supporters, anyway as I said if we have ever talked rugby before you’ve heard this story, it was during my usual telling of this story that Michelle not only remembers the game I’m describing but she was there!

Aaaaaaaaanyway back to the boat, as we head out at a slow pace we’re given a quick safety instruction by Brett and told that we will be heading about an hour and a half out to sea before dive 1, moving to a second location, completing dive 2 and then time for lunch on board and some snorkling if we wanted it. Now its safe to say at this point I’m a little bit nervous… maybe a smidgen more than little… for followers of my blog or facebook you will know I’ve not had much to do with the sea/ocean/any open water and now I'm sat on a boat with a load of strangers about to be dropped into the ocean 8 miles off the coast with a tank of compressed air and some flippers… thankfully I was distracted from how I was feeling by the need to complete a short written test for my PADI qualification which took around half the journey out there and before I knew it we were anchored up and it was time to go in… Michelle told me afterwards I looked really calm and took it all in my stride… if only she could have heard the panicked swear words flying around inside my head.

After successfully getting into the water and inflating my BCD (buoyancy control device…air filled jacket), Michelle signalled it was time to get under the water and demonstrate some of the skills I had learned the day before under the ocean… on my way down the first time i had to half fill my mask with water and then demonstrate I could clear it, it all went pretty well until I took my first breath after clearing and realised I had left a small amount of water in my mask, I took an involuntarily breath in through my nose and the panic really set in. After what felt like an eternity of not being able to catch my breath again I signalled to Michelle I need to get back up to the surface. All credit to her she managed to calm me down a little with just hand gestures and then swim slowly back to the surface. After a short while on the surface I caught my breath, gave myself a good talking to, manned up and told Michelle I was ready to go down again. I’m so glad I did, once I had relaxed into it, done my practical demonstrations and descended down to about 14 meters, Michelle took me on a tour of a spectacular section of the great barrier reef, where we spotted Rays, Sea Cucumbers, spectacular fish, Eels and Barracuda, all of which Michelle would point out to me and gesture for the type of animal I was thoroughly enjoying myself… and then…Michelle turns to me with as much of a massive grin as can be done with a regulator in your mouth and real excitement in her eyes and puts her hand up to her head to make the symbol for fin… in an unmistakeable attempt to tell me she had spotted a shark!! I turned to were she was pointing and signalling we should swim and sure enough, just a couple dozen feet away was a sodding shark! I am not at all ashamed to say I shat myself! Michelle later told me that by the time she turned around to check on me (only a couple of seconds) not only had I fallen further back than any other time during the dive but I had also Ascended a good few meters (this was not concious, this was my sub-concious saying… ERM no thanks I don’t want to follow you and swim towards a shark!). Michelle and I discussed this shark in great detail that day and the next couple of times we saw each other and I have slowly come round to the realisation that when she says it was just a wee baby reef shark she's probably telling the truth and the huge man eating great white I saw may have been somewhat of an over-reaction on behalf of my imagination.

After the dive and back on the boat before the second dive I began to feel a little sea sick and unfortunately despite the wonderful things I saw on both dives it really put a downer on the whole experience. Having reflected on it I think the reason I reacted so badly to both days on the boat, despite taking sea sickness pills on the second may have had something to do with a problem I had with Labyrinthitis a few years ago that may have permanently impacted my inner ear.

On the way back in I got talking to the aforementioned Jess about what she had seen, when she had done her PADI course back in America and her trip which she was doing alone in 3 weeks from New York through Auckland, Sydney, Port Douglas and was heading on to the west coast. We got on really well and as it turned out we were staying at the same place and had both accepted Michelle’s invitation to go for a beer a few hours after the dive we would walk down together. I think its safe to say we clicked instantly, she is a really nice girl with a cool attitude towards life and over the next few hours we talked about pretty much everything from how my travel was going, the fact that her girlfriend had turned down her offer to join her but that wasn’t the end of the world as she liked being alone, my love of America but dislike of new York, both of our childhoods, future plans…everything. By the end of the night we had become firm friends and it was unfortunate that she was heading off the next day but we became facebook friends and only decided not to get married so I could have an American Green Card for 2 reasons, 1 I don’t want to live in New York and 2 she’s gay and has a girlfriend… C'est La Vie, I’ve mad a new friend and if for whatever reason I loose my senses and go back to new York someone to visit!Read more