Snorkelling, scuba and storms

[This is a bit old now, but internet time has been limited...been too busy :)]

So as you see from the pictures below I finally made it out on the Santa Maria, a replica schooner, for my 3 day 2 night trip to the Great Barrier Reef. The other folk on board were lovely, there were only seven of us, plus three crew (four brits, two canadians, a south african, a kiwi, a croatian german and our skipper was dutch!).

We motored for about four hours to reach Milln reef on the outer reef. After being served a great lunch and letting it settle a bit, we jumped in for some snorkelling. The reef was only a metre or two below the surface so you could instantly see amazing fish and coral. It was great but I was also determined to also try scuba diving for the first time.

You can do an 'intro' dive if you're not certified, it means that you can only go to 10m, and the instructor will handhold you a bit more. Actually, Jonny didn't so much handhold me on the first dive as gently grab the scruff of my jacket and steer me around the place! I spent the first three minutes trying to remember how to breathe normally, but when we reached the coral it was just so amazing that I was too busy looking at fish to worry about my air supply. Perhaps the fact I looked a bit awestruck was why I got steered around, but it was great, he would spot stuff and then send me over - which is how I got to within touching distance of a hawksbill turtle feeding on the coral. Really amazing.

And yes, once again I lucked out with the personal guide aspect...I was the only one doing intro dives so each time it was just me and Jonny (who was from Edinburgh of all places). By the third dive I was swimming around on my own, dawdling off to take even more photos as he used his (patent pending) shark attractor to try and gather some big fish for us. Oh yes, a shark attractor.

It was brilliant! On that dive we managed to get two white tipped reef sharks and two grey reef sharks circling around, they are such graceful animals.

So over the three days we visited five or so different sites across Milln and Thetford reefs, each one was different - some had canyons to dive through, others had huge columns of coral with shoals of fish swirling around them, another weirdly keep putting Monty Python and the Holy Grail into my head as the coral just looked exactly like a really neatly maintained shrubbery.

All sounds pretty idyllic huh? Well you did notice the last word of my title didn't you? Yep, we suffered for our sailing. The first evening it started to rain*, and I mean rain. Then after we went to bed it turned into a pretty big storm. What that means when you're in a quite small wooden boat, is that you roll...a lot. And as you hit the furthest reaches of your arc you hear a huge crash as all the crockery hits the side, and then you roll back. Crash. Roll. Crash. Creak. Roll. Bang. Roll. Crash. REALLY LOUD BANG. Roll. Crash... etc etc for hours, you get the picture.

Turns out that the really loud bang was our mooring line breaking. That really thick bit of rope that keeps you in one place rather than hitting the reef? Thankfully our crew had also tied what they call a 'paranoia line'!

Anyway, I think between the 10 of us we probably managed about about 20 hours sleep that night. But given the seafaring nature of lots of (other) parts of the Rendle family I'd like to point out I was in the 57% of passengers who did not throw up at any point over the three days :)

*Quite brilliant watching the wall of precipitation move towards you at speed across the ocean...three, two, one...WET.