It's been quite a while since I've written anything and I've done some pretty special things recently you might be interested in reading about.

I just got back from an overnight diving trip to the reef. We left from Cairns early in the morning on a big catamaran and arrived at the reef for our first dive after 1.5 hrs. The trip out was quite choppy and some people were beginning to get sick (I was on the verge). There were about 40 people on the boat and it was quite hectic getting our gear sorted for the dive. Roundabout half the people were just snorkeling. I partnered up with a Spanish guy and girl, Jesus and Anna, as dive buddies. Anna had done 600+ dives and Jesus 70+. We did two dives on that boat before being transferred to the liveaboard boat.

The liveaboard boat was much less crowded (only about a dozen of us transferred over as the others were only doing a day trip). There were a few others already on the liveaboard boat making for a total of about 20 people. On the liveaboard we did 2 more dives that day, including one night dive at 7:30pm. We navigated with flashlights but nobody saw all that much (we did see a turtle and sharks). One cool things was that the eyes of crabs and shrimp reflected back red light and were easy to spot in the coral and sharks' eyes reflected back a green light and were sort of stunned when you shined the light in their eyes. After the night dive we watched the crew fish for sharks with a fish head tied on the end of a rope. They managed to pull one shark halfway onto the deck (video). Then we spent some time at the bar and finally collapsed into bed.

We were woken up at 5:50am for our first dive. The weather had turned a bit sour with the wind and clouds rolling in. At 7:30 we had breakfast (all of our meals were great) and then did two more dives in the morning. After lunch we packed our things and chilled on the sun deck, waiting to be transferred to the boat back to Cairns. By 4:30 we were back in Cairns and the company gave us rides back to the hostel.

My dive buddy and I had similar thoughts about the reef and others agreed. We were disappointed by how much dead coral there was (over half was dead and covered in algae - this could be because we mostly explored the reef edges which are most affected by ocean swell). We didn't see the numbers of fish we expected to. The visibility was ok but not spectacular (15-20 meters) partly because the rough conditions were churning up lots of sediment. The light was quite poor because of the clouds and so the colors weren't as good as they could have been (hence all the underwater pics look blue-green). What was awesome was the landscape of the coral reef. There were so many little ins and outs to explore and the walls of the reefs were sometimes 20 meters high. The size of the corals was impressive and the diversity of fish was awesome. It's another world underwater.

It was heaps of fun but if I did it again, I would go somewhere more remote with fewer people and hope for better weather.