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Australia 2010: Day 06: April 30

Didn’t have a good sleep last night, woke up at 243, 340ish, 440ish, 540ish. and we left at about 640ish to walk to the Reef Fleet Terminal down Spence St.

We booked through GoDo.com, and ended up with Passions of Paradise. I say ended up with because it didn’t seem like one of the bigger rides at the harbour. However, the crew was great fun and were very helpful, recommended.

After a long sail ride and before actually realizing where we were, as group 1, scuba diving!! Awesome. It was a bit odd breathing through my mouth but I got used to it. Nasty salty taste on the mouthpieces… Breathe! So we were supposed to do a breath in, take piece out, bubble bubble, mouth piece in, and TWO to get rid of the water… But of course, once I put the mouthpiece in, breathe IN choke choke cough.. Blargh. Ew.

The reef was amazing. Beautiful. I like the view of forests and odd trees and this was even better, underwater and oh so very odd. I wish I had a camera to take as many pictures as I wanted. Anyways, we stayed with the instructor, Steve… Told be to grab on so…. I did. Who am I to say otherwise 😛 it was difficult to maintain depth though, I need to gain some muscle weight 😉 brought us down and led us around. Played with some jellyfish, clown fish and their anemones, we even saw and swam a bit with a turtle! amazing. Before I knew it, 30 minutes was up. I didn’t really understand all the hand signals, just ‘ok’ the whole time 😛

Right after scuba we jumped in again for snorkeling! But by this time I was pretty damn tired – -;… Although there was a great view of the coral and fish, I was swimming off in an odd direction and just wanted to get to the damn beach to sit down. Snorkeling right after scuba diving messed me up a bit because going down meant I couldn’t breathe in and out. Swallowed a lot of salt water a couple times, choke cough cough. Got to the beach/island/cay whatever and the sand was beautiful and is apparently 80% parrotfish poop! Yum. There was a lot of wind and SO many birds. A lot of them were just riding the winds it was pretty amazing. Being as tired as we were we jumped on the glass-bottom boat back to the ship instead of snorkeling back. It was cold out in the wind and in the wetsuit… We were actually at Michaelmas Cay.

Lunchtime…. Fish feeding! They fed a bunch of fish that swam near the surface, aggressive.

After lunch we went over to Paradise Reef and snorkeled around for half an hour. Again, amazing. The coral was beautiful and multicoloured, swam with many schools of fish but they always ran away when I tried to touch them 🙁 lol… Many large parrotfish, some neon ones, black body white tailed, etc…… And more clown fish with their cool anemones. Played with some more jellyfish and watched as other fish took a bite out of them and watched as a smaller fish cleaned a parrotfish, crazy stuff down there. I also saw some snorkeler swim down to the coral and snap a piece off. Jerk. Continuing on…. For the half an hour I just stared down at the coral and fishes, floated along with the current and time just swam by. Oh. the underwater camera Rosanna borrowed from her friend brokedown before leaving Michaelmas Cay but is now working again in the hostel – -;… so we missed any underwater pics at Paradise Reef.

Back on the boat we spent an hour or two heading back to land. Sunburnt. Only on the front half sans bathing suit covered area. Red and starting to sting as I write this. Steve, the scuba instructor knows a lot of magic and card tricks that kept a lot of us entertained while not sunburning/bathing. Good job passions! Great experience.

Booking our flight and stay to Melbourne for 3 nights… whee… tomorrow, kuranda.


Great Barrier Reef! by Michaelmas Cay


Whatever this thing is…. by Michaelmas Cay


Crazy birds at Michaelmas Cay

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