Day 11:
I wanted to make sure that I didn’t spend our entire time in Cairns apart, so Jill and I scheduled a snorkeling trip together. We left from Cairns directly this time, so the morning wasn’t nearly as early as it had been the previous couple of days.
Again we were on a high-speed catamaran, this time from Reef Magic, but instead of going to three different reef sites, we went to a gigantic permanently moored pontoon. This acts as a bit of a floating city with a semi-submersible boat, a helicopter landing pad, dining facilities, an underwater viewing platform, and a moon pool for the SCUBA divers. This kind of setup has become standard for all of the snorkeling operations on the Great Barrier Reef.
Jill had a little trepidation about snorkeling at first, but quickly found her sea flippers. We did a ton of snorkeling throughout the day and explored all of the ins-and-outs of the coral head we were stationed at. I even rediscovered my love of free diving and by the end of the day was easily able to hit the deep parts of the reef at about 12 meters (40 feet) and bring back sea cucumbers for Jill to play with. Even Jill commented on the lack of fish at the reef though.
One of the interesting side effects of this particular trip was that I realized in certain cases (i.e shallow reefs), you can have just as much, if not more, fun skin and free diving than SCUBA diving. You can do it for longer and the setup and tear-down time are much reduced. I really enjoyed freaking out the introductory divers by swimming down to them and waving. They couldn’t quite understand how someone was down that deep without SCUBA gear on.
Jill Update:
Today was a really good day for us; probably the best so far even. Jill was very nervous at the beginning, but I think after she got out in the water we really had a good time together.
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