I’m a bad blogger…

Its been an extremely long time since my last post. Sorry about that. I’m not very good at this whole journaling thing. Anyway I just got back from my spring break trip to Australia so I figured I’d write about it while its still fresh in my mind. More NZ stuff to come. I promise.

I left for Cairns, Australia the friday before last. My flight left at 6:15 AM (due to an extremely obstinate management professor. more on this later.) so one of my buddies Will was kind enough to drop me off at the airport around 4:45. After the trans-tasman flight and a 3 hour layover in Brisbane I finally arrived in Cairns (pronunced “cans”, its an Aussie thing). I took a shuttle bus to the office of the dive company of my trip. I met my roomate Alex who goes to Vanderbilt there, he was able to catch a flight the day before and got to play in Cairns for a day. After lots of waiting and boring paperwork, Alex and I and the rest of the dive group piled ino the buses to harbor to embark on our home for the next 4 days, the M.V. Taka. Its a 100 foot single hulled dive boat with enough cabins for around 30 passengers and 12 crew. Alex and I shared a room along with our new friends Steve (a retired attorney from virginia now sailing around the world) and Joe (a younger business man working in sydney but originally from Sri-Lanka).

As we left cairns, everyone was assigned gear for the trip and we got wetsuits and everything like that all sorted out. We steamed overnight to our dive site for the next day on the great barrier reef. That night we also got an intorduction to the crew, who were all awesome. We also got an inroduction to what it feels like to live on a relatively small boat that is making its way through the open ocean. I count myself very lucky in that apparently I don’t get seasick. The same couldn’t be said for some of the other passengers. THere were some green faces saturday morning.

At 7 AM Saturday we begain the breifing for our first dive and before I knew it itwas 4 days and 14 dives later and we were heading back to Cairns. I saw so many incredible things on the trip. We saw massive turtles at least twice the size of ones I saw in Hawaii. I also saw several white tip reef sharks, some stingrays, and a cuttlefish (kind of like an octopus with a really big head and small arms). I also found Nemo. Its amazing how much boidiversity there is on the GBR. I think I saw more different species of animal on a single dive that I’ve seen combined the rest of my life. It was astounding. I also had the opportunity to do my first 3 night dives which was a completely new experience. It wasn’t as scary as it sounds and it was actually kind of peaceful. We helped some larger fish who hunt by sight find some small fish and if you kept your light on a small fish out in the open you could watch the larger fish chase it down. It was awesome.

I’m extremely glad that I was able to do a liveaboard trip as well. The reason for this was that our last 2 dives were where most of the day trippers go and the coral and fish were nowhere near what they were further up the reef where we had been. The difference was shocking.

The food on the trip was great, as were all of the other passengers and crew. Most of the passengers were old enough to be my parents, but there were a few of us who managed to close the generational gap. Everyone was firendly and there weren’t any snobs. THere was even a professional photographer on the trip who has had work in nat’l geographic!

After a disembarking, we checked into our hostel and met up with some of the crew and passengers for dinner and drinks at a bar by the beach. THe next day I explored the city of Cairns (very touristy) and flew to sydney that night. But that another story and I’m tired of writing so thats it for now.

-Mike