cairns liveaboard

i went on a liveaboard dive boat for 3 days.  it was definitely the highlight so far of this trip.  friday morning i got picked up and taken to the boat, a massive dive boat but only 30 people.  after the worst dive buddy ever i was pretty nervous that i'd get stuck with someone i didn't like.  made small talk with people for a bit, the cutest boy on the boat sat next to me (good start), got our room assignments.  i shared a bunk with iseta, an australian/african woman maybe a few years older than me.  she was absolutely perfect.  

one constant since i've been in australia is the vast number of nordic type people i've met.  swedish, norwegian, danish, etc.  i'm not certain that nordic is the word i want but i don't have internet right now so that's what i'm calling them.  probably half the boat was from those countries.  the cute boy (colin) and i were the only americans.  

the initial trip to the reef was 3 hours and we spent the time getting briefed on the plans, watching a safety video, getting to know the people that we were stuck with for 3 solid days on a boat.  pretty quickly the group separated into the small groups that we'd spend all of our time with, and i loved them.  my friends were colin, darryl and angela (australian), chiu-ki (korea) and francesco (france), iseta (australia), linn and annelin (norway), kerry (south africa), and lea (sweden).  the crew i mostly hung out with were veronica (sweden), warren (south africa) and aric (poland).  i spilled coffee in the first 5 minutes i was on the boat and warren called me hawaiian trouble, and that's what i was for the rest of the trip.

we did 4 dives our first day and they were amazing.  white tip sharks, rays, eels, anemone fish (nemos), giant clams, all the same stuff but massive amounts of them.  the reef was endless.  the first dive i buddied with iseta but after that she started taking her advanced open water course and i couldn't dive with her again.  the second dive i buddied with chiu-ki and francesco, and at the last minute grabbed veronica (crew) since she had an hour free.  we ended up ditching chiu-ki and francesco since he was taking pictures and forward movement was pretty slow.  the upside to that was that veronica was the cook and after being her buddy she started making me my own private dishes without onions, eventually making almost the entire menu onion free.  

i can't remember the last time i've eaten so well.  the first day it seemed like all we did was dive and eat.  diving takes so much energy and veronica cooked up more food than could possibly have been eaten by twice that many people.  if it wasn't a main meal time there was cake, fruit, cookies, but the meals were beyond expectation.  

the third dive i didn't want to go with the picture takers again so i asked colin and darryl if i could jump in with them.  darryl's main purpose of the trip was to swim with turtles.  i had seen turtles on both my first dives so he was happy to have me along, called me turtle girl.  he hadn't seen one yet.  

for some reason every dive i've done in australia i've ended up being the leader and navigator.  i'm not sure why that is since i have the worst navigation skills on the planet, but people are happy to follow me.  to my great surprise i find that i'm an underwater navigational goddess.  i always know where the boat is, even if i think i'm lost.  i'm still having a hard time reconciling this idea.  so colin and darryl are more than happy to follow me around.  

our first nite dive was great.  there were sharks everywhere, white tips and greys.  we found a spotted leopard shark hiding in a cave.  starfish and shrimp and cool things lurking in strange places.  navigating at nite was easy because the boat turned all its lites on and it glowed underwater.

sleeping on the boat was a challenge for me.  i've had sleep problems for this entire trip, i can't remember a nite when i didn't wake up several times wondering where i was, but the boat was hard.  i didn't mind the rocking but my cabin was near the generator so very loud, the air-conditioning wasn't working so it was hot, and my bunk was about a foot shorter than i needed.  i tried to sleep sideways but the wooden bed frame dug into my legs, iseta left the door open for some cool air but we couldn't figure out how to turn out the hall lites so it was bright too.  i ended up sleeping about 3 hours the first nite.

we saw lots of great stuff on the first dive of the second day.  half an hour in i'm checking on air and darryl told me that he's half so i planned a meandering trail that will take us 15 minutes to get back to the boat.  but obviously i wasn't paying close attention because darryl actually told me that he's low on air and i didn't get it.  so i was wandering through corals and he grabbed me and told me that he only has 50 bar left, we were 10 minutes from the boat.  oops.  i still had over 100 bar so i wasn't worried about anyone dying, we could share if necessary.  we made it back to the boat and they told darryl's wife to look out, i'm trying to kill him.  i asked if she has insurance, and if she really loves him that much.  we didn't see his turtle.

colin and darryl had been buddies all day but darryl decided to ditch us and go with annelin and linn, they were more his speed in terms of air consumption.  and cute boy was now my permanent dive buddy.  

like darryl, annelin wanted nothing more than to swim with a turtle and she hadn't seen one either.  

the second dive was fantastic again, schools of sweetlips, bump headed parrots, rays, great.  again i can't believe that i can get dumped in a giant ocean, zigzag through coral formations, get sidetracked by animal watching, and still find the boat when we need to.  i was beginning to develop an ego.  and that's usually when it all goes wrong.

the third dive colin and i set out to find something called 'clown fish city'.  we descend, find the mooring blocks, swim at 150 degrees through a couple giant rocks that turtles might be hanging out at, then find a trio of huge coral formations called 'mickey mouse' and we should find all of the anemone fish.  that was the plan.  then we continue to the wall, put it on our right shoulder and make a square back to the boat, returning at 300 degrees.  no problem.  after an hour of discussion we never figured out what went wrong.  

part of the problem was that i brought my camera, this was the third dive of the day and pretty shallow and my underwater camera can take 10 meters or so.  so i started off not paying close attention.  another problem was colin chasing a turtle and i didn't make note of our new direction.  we never made it to mickey mouse or clown fish city and i still can't understand how we got so far off course.  the only thing that makes sense is that we swam through some sort of narnia wardrobe, instead of returning to the boat at 300 degrees we had to surface for visual confirmation and set a course at 60 degrees, about 300 yards away.  we were in some seriously deep water, no fish, no coral, just colin and i and dark blue.  

standing on the top deck afterward we could see the entire reef in light greens and blues, so close to the boat, and it didn't look like there was any way we could have taken a wrong turn.  but somehow we must have taken a swim through to the other side of the reef and went the complete opposite direction.  the spotters on the boat saw us surface and when we returned we were subjected to every joke imaginable.  everyone heard about our dive.  it was nonstop laughing at our course.

after dinner we had another nite dive, the joke was that i should make sure i swam back to the boat lites, not the one light miles and miles away.  that didn't stop 4 other people asking if they could join my group.  we descended and instantly saw about a dozen sharks circling under us, a very intimidating site.  the hightlite of the nite was the biggest turtle i've ever seen who sleeps in a cave nearby.  easily the size of a small car, he was over 100 years old.  unfortunately darryl was not in my group and never saw him.  we never got lost.

iseta had gotten her advanced open water certificate during the day so we celebrated with the bottle of vodka i had brought.  we found some orange juice boxes for mixer and had a party.  i thought that might help me sleep the second nite but i was wrong.  the crew had tried to fix the air con in our room but couldn't get it to work, instead they cranked up the air and everyone else was freezing.  didn't help us.  i ended up sleeping in the salon for about 4 hours before veronica had to start preparing breakfast.  

the final day of the trip was 3 dives at coral gardens.  i don't have enough adjectives to describe how beautiful it was.  colin and i had great dives and my navigation was once again perfect.  darryl had left annelin and linn's group because they couldn't find a turtle and joined another, and it was exactly as expected, annelin and linn spent 20 minutes with a turtle and darryl's group never saw one.  darryl was the only person on the boat who didn't see a turtle.  finally, someone else that everyone can make jokes about instead of me.  

linn and i spent most of the trip home in the wheel house, she wanted to steer the boat.  we had a last briefing before we got to port, and the crew made plans to meet everyone later at a bar for dinner and drinks.  aric drew up a navigational chart to the bar with directions in degrees for colin and me.  

i got word at the bar that there was a foosball table nearby so we headed out to find it, there was no foosball but more wet tshirt contests.  what a way to end my time in cairns.

aric doing a dive briefing