We spent the weekend in Cairns before we took off on our dive trip. Cairns is a beach town similar to something you'd find in the Caribbean. We stayed at the Hilton Doubletree. Our room didn't have a kitchen but we bought cereal and yogurt so we could have breakfast in the room. We ate our cereal out of the water glasses since we didn't have bowls. Afterwards, I rinsed them and stacked them with the dirty coffee mugs. The next morning, I discovered that the maid had not replaced them with clean glasses; she obviously barely rinsed them before putting them back with fresh paper covers. Disgusting!! I had the manager call me and reported it, she did not want to come see the evidence. Our compensation was a tin of cookies. I will be posting a bad review.

Early Monday morning we boarded the Spirit of Freedom for our outer Great Barrier
Reef live-aboard. I was apprehensive about the accommodations on the boat - 7 days is a long time to spend in a tiny yucky room. This was our 3rd live aboard and even though we had the best cabin on the Similan Islands live aboard last month, it left a lot to be desired. Bill has learned to book a better cabin for me and while we did not pay the extra $850 for the master cabin, we did get the "deluxe" cabin, which is on the top deck and had three large windows. I was relieved to find it was better than I expected. While there was no room to spare, it had a decent bed, and the bathroom may actually have been bigger (if not nearly as nice) as the bathroom in our trailer. It was the first cabin that I was willing to spend time in when we weren't sleeping.

Our daily schedule began by being rudely awakened at 6:30am (not my idea of vacationing) then it was eat dive, eat dive, eat dive, eat dive, eat dive, sleep, and repeat. This means you really only have an hour or so for sun tanning or napping on deck or downloading pictures between dives. It is not a leisurely vacation but we still loved it.

The food on live-aboards is plentiful and on this trip it was excellent. First breaky was cereal, yogurt and fruit. Second breaky was eggs, beans, toast, hash browns, bacon (ham), sausages, sometimes pancakes, etc. Lunch was different each day, but there was always several kinds of meat and fish, salads, something Asian, lots to choose from. Dinner was always plated (all other meals were buffet style) and really great food. We had salmon, lamb, steak, fish, Mexican, pasta and we always had excellent veggies on a bed of something pureed. Twice we had a BBQ on deck with many different types of meat all at once (including kangaroo) and fish. It was kind of like a Brazilian meat fest. Fabulous deserts always followed dinner. I asked them to stop serving me the meat after the second day because it was such a large portion and I eat so little meat that just sampling from Bill's plate was plenty.

We were very lucky with the weather on our trip. 2 weeks earlier there was Cyclone Marcia (a category 4) and now there is another smaller cyclone, Norman (a Category 2) coming, which should hit just as the boat gets out to Lizard Island. In our case the sea and the wind was very calm. We had 4 overnight sailings to get to and from the various reefs and except for a few rogue waves (one of which almost tossed me out of bed) it was mostly gentle rocking.

I did 24 dives and Bill did 25, on about 20 different dive sites. The first few days we were in the ribbon reefs in the north of the Great Barrier Reef. This is outside the area of the day trips and thus in much better shape. Pixie Pinnacle and Lighthouse Bommie were particularly beautiful with lots of fish and great corals. The 2nd half
of the trip was out on Osprey Reef (it's like a large sunken island) in the Coral Sea over 100 miles from the nearest land.

No two dive sites were alike. Some were not as pretty as others and had some cyclone damage from recent years past. Some were good spots for seeing bigger fish, or different types of coral. A few of them were really beautiful with thousands of fish and great soft coral. The colors are brilliant but it does not show up well in most of our pictures. One of the Japanese divers gave us some of his pics, you will
easily be able to tell which ones they are. His dive camera set up cost him more than $15k. We aren't going to do anything like that but we have decided to invest in an underwater strobe light for our camera. The built in flash in our camera really doesn't do much unless Bill can get really close, otherwise the photos can be flat and very blue/green.

We saw lots of different nudibranchs. They are really cool shell-less snail type creatures that come in lots of different shapes, colors, and patterns. They are usually one to two inches long at most, so they are not easy to spot. They are not found in the Caribbean, so I was glad to finally see some. There were tons of clams here, all different sizes, colors and patterns (our photos don't do them justice). Some were gigantic. There were also lots of sea cucumbers which I call sea ***** because they lie out in the sand and look like giant *****. Bill noticed one opening and closing what looked like a mouth so he waved me over just in time to see it take a big dump (turns out that wasn't its mouth). I rolled my eyes but he almost drowned from laughing so hard at my reaction.

Diving is a bit of a competitive sport. After each dive everybody talks about what they saw both big and small. For the big stuff it's kind of like fishing with a 'my shark was bigger than your shark' theme being quite common. The bragging continues at meals and on the deck in the evenings (and we were the 'winners' one night with an 8+' sea snake). It is both fun and challenging to search for and find something special in such a vast area. That said, sometimes it feels like we are so focused on searching for the hidden golden treasure that we are not really appreciating all the silver that is in plain view. I love watching the soft corals wave in the current and the feeling that I am in a huge aquarium. It is so colorful and alive that it can't really be described or photographed. Floating along is very relaxing when you stop searching and just enjoy the experience. Bill and I were the first in
the water and the last out on every dive. I only had to save his life once, when he ignored the fact that his wireless pressure gauge was not reading any air in his tank (Hey, this had happened to me before and my computer would synchronize after we submerged so I wasn't that worried). It turns out he really didn't have any air as the crew didn't refill his tank. We got down to about 40 ft before his tank ran dry and so we had to buddy breathe off my tank and resurface. What would he do without me? In my defense, I would like to point out that we dove on our own on every dive (that is, we didn't follow a dive master) and I navigated us back to the boat every time while Dessa never even knew what direction the boat was in. Bottom line, she needs me too!

At one site we did a Potato Cod feed (that's the name of the fish, we didn't feed potatoes to Cod). These are huge fish, I would guess the biggest was between 1 and 2 hundred pounds. We 'sat' in a circle and the dive master fed them by hand as we watched. Then she came around in front of each of us and fed him again. The Potato Cod was impressive but the red snappers had really mean looking teeth so they were the scary ones as they darted around trying to get some of the food. Before the dive we were warned to not wave our hands around if we wanted to keep all our fingers.

We did two night dives. On the first, it was kind of like the cod feed, as there were large grouper, snappers and even white tip sharks swimming around us. Whenever someone lit up a small fish with their flashlight, the groupers, snappers and sharks would rush in to feed. It was kinda scary at first to be swimming in the dark with obviously hungry sharks but they were clearly more interested in the fish on the menu than any international cuisine (a Texas Diver). On the 2nd night dive, we saw a large blue parrotfish sleeping in a hole in the coral, surrounded by a huge mucus bubble. This bubble keeps the sharks and other predators from being able to sense him. Parrotfish blow these bubbles every night and then eat them for breakfast every morning.

We saw many great things, and marveled at the differences between here and all the other places we have dived. After dinner while we were anchored off of Lizard Island, the crew went out on the dive deck and attracted 4 big (7-8 ft) nurse sharks just by slapping the water. They actually patted them on top of their heads and fed them left over fish from dinner. They would not let any passengers do it as they said that if we were bit they would get sued, but if any of the crew got bit they
would get workers comp.

The one thing that was consistent, on every dive there was at least one shark. We missed the Great Whites when we were in Port Douglas but we got our fill of sharks on this trip. We saw white and black tips, nurse, a 9' Leopard and even a hammerhead (from a distance). On one dive we did a shark feed. All the divers sat in a circle while a steel cage was lowered from the dive tender. The cage had large tuna heads attached to a chain and floats which pop out of the top when released. The sharks know the routine, so as soon as we got in the water they started gathering at the site. As we swam down to the site they were circling overhead. There were about 40 sharks, 4-8 feet long, of various types, plus one giant cod that apparently is not too worried about sharks. When the cage was lowered they all swarmed it but since they couldn't reach the food, they went back to circling. When they had settled down a bit the guide swam in amongst them and cut the seals on the cage lid. He backed away then triggered the latch and the sharks all attacked. They stripped every scrap of fish off the chain in less than 2 minutes, biting the chain and each other in the frenzy. We were only about 20 feet from the cage and if you watch the video, you will see them flash past us no more than 5 feet away. By the time this trip ended swimming with sharks was really no big deal.

By day seven I was ready to be done. I skipped one dive, even though it meant I might have missed seeing something really special. I decided it was a risk I was willing to take. Bill enjoyed the dive but there was nothing really special so skipping was a good choice. Although it was a possibility on Osprey Reef, we still have not seen a manta ray, so that stays on the bucket list. We met some nice people. One couple from Fort Worth and another that live really close to Bill's family in Canada. It is a small world.

This was a great dive trip but I am glad to be back on solid ground. This next week we will be exploring northern Queensland from Cairns to Port Douglas.

PS. Although Dessa decided to sleep in rather than go on shore mid week to hike on Lizard Island, I did go and in her honor took some flower photos. So for those of you that were hoping to have a break from the flowers – no such luck.

PPS. I still have to pull together the dive video from the trip. This will likely take a few more days so we'll send a new email when its ready

As always, higher resolution photos are available on Flikr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bill_and_ dessa/sets/