Great Barrier Reef

After an awesome time in Daintree, Hari and I headed to Cairns where we would book some diving in the famous Great Barrier Reef. We spent a few days in Cairnes to hang out and find a good dive shop to book our trip. Cairns itself is a very backpacker friendly town, the main drag is lined with hostels/hotels, surf and dive shops, and restaurants. While the town is on the water, there is no beach but instead a massively long boardwalk where everyone hangs out, jogs, and rides bicycles (I was really psyched to get in some runs along the water, I had been missing running as part of my daily routine but was trying to get it back in my schedule). There is a huge public swimming pool area along one section of the boardwalk that was always bustling - it had fountains where little kids splashed around and tons of people sun bathing along the faux-shoreline. It was a cool place to walk around, but we didn't spend too much time near the pool, as we were on a diving mission.


We were a bit nervous when we first arrived because we weren't sure how the cyclone would affect diving conditions, but luckily the dive shops we spoke to said within a few days visibility should clear up so we booked a 3 day/2 night trip to depart a few days later. In the meantime, we parked in front of the TV/DVD at our guesthouse and very excitedly caught up on several episodes of Lost from the new season, as Hari's mom sent us a DVD of all the episodes in Australia.


Our departure day finally came and we anxiously headed to the dive shop to be on our way. We could not wait to get back in the water and to see the Reef after hearing so much about it. We got all of our equipment together and hopped on board the speedboat that would take us to the live-aboard a few hours offshore. Thankfully, unlike the bumpy speedboat ride in the Similan Islands where many people got seasick, this ride was a lot smoother.


We got to our live aboard, met our fellow dive team, and were briefed by the head DM, Vincent, on the diving protocol in Australia. It was quite different than diving in Thailand and Indonesia - for starters, all certified divers went under without a DM unless you opted to pay an additional AUD 15/dive to have a DM show you around the sites. While Hari and I both successfully completed our underwater navigation tests during our Advanced Open Water dive courses, we had never navigated dive sites ourselves without a DM guiding us...doing it alone would definitely be a new learning experience! Also, in Thailand there are really no regulations as far as air consumption is concerned but in Australia every diver legally has to surface with at least 50 bars of air remaining in their tanks - this is a bit of a conservative regulation, as in Thailand we would start our 3 minute safety stops when we hit 40 or 50 bars, often leading us to surface with only 10-20 bars. What this regulation means in essence is shorter dives, but I guess it's always best to be safe. Another difference with the GBR is that we had to wear stinger suits to protect us from the deadly marine stingers that were brought in by the currents instead of wet suits - because the water was so warm (about 28-29 degrees Celcius), we would not need wetsuits to keep us warm which was a huge plus for me since I tend to get cold underwater very easily.


After getting briefed we got into our gear and were ready to hit the water. For our first dive it was required that we had a DM take us down just to make sure that we were really qualified and safe to be navigating a site by ourselves. Unfortunately, because we were with some beginner divers, our dive time was a mere 30 minutes. At least we passed the test to dive by ourselves and would be able to stay down longer in our future dives.



It was great to be underwater again, but to be completely honest, Hari and I were both a little disappointed with the quality of the Reef. I know that we were only in a small section of the southern part of the Reef, but I was very surprised as to how damaged and bleached most of the coral was. Maybe my expectations were a bit unrealistic, I imagined that the acquatic life and coral would be 100x better than that of Thailand, but unfortunately it was not. Due to rising water temperatures and the holes in the ozone layer above the reef, much of the coral is bleached white and lacks the brilliant colors that we saw throughout both eastern and western Thailand. It is a shame that the changing environment keeps damaging the coral more and more every year, I just hope that the damage slows, otherwise the entire reef will be wiped out.




But don´t get me wrong, despite my expectations being a bit too high the acquatic life was still really great - on every dive we saw tons of Nemos, humbugs (adorable black and white striped fish that are about the size of your pinky nail, some of my favorites), rainbowfish, parrotfish, etc. We did get ¨lost¨ a few times underwater, but overall we made our way around pretty successfully. One thing that was really cool is that we would station at one dive site in the morning and get 2-3 dives at each site, which gave us the opportunity to learn our way around and make sure that we saw all parts of the reef instead of having to rush around. One of the dive sites had a massive drop off that was actually pretty scary - we were under about 20 meters or so when all of a sudden there was a wall that dropped off over 1000 meters. Looking down was really intimidating, I kept my distance from the wall...even though there was really no chance of falling into the abyss, I still wanted to be cautious!




Overall we had a great time on our dive trip. Even though we were a little let down on the conditions of the Reef, we still did get in some great dives and saw some great marine life. I would like to return to the more northern section of the Reef in the future, perhaps the conditions in other sections are in better condition...either way, it is up to us to be environmentally responsible so the damage to the Reef does not continue. And that´s my little ¨go green¨ cheer for the blog, do your part and protect our planet!