One Fish Two Fish, day 8

DAY EIGHT:

On the eighth morning we woke up early again and trooped to the harbor to meet yet another boat for the day. This was our Great Barrier Reef day. Although it was the biggest boat we had been on, and I really never usually get seasick, me and the rocking of that boat didn't get along too well that morning. Nothing too spectacular, but I did spend a good chunk of our trip out front in the fresh air, concentrating on the horizon lol. It was kind of gross that morning, but thankfully it didn't decide to rain on me, and it was even clear by the time we got to where we were stopping. That's great news for scuba and snorkeling since you can see much more that way. I was in something like the third group to go scuba diving, so we all listened to the briefing and explanation and went to grab stinger suits, snorkels, and flippers. When it was our turn, we met our instructor Kelly :) and were suited up with a weight belt and full scuba gear. Once we were all hooked up, we tipped into the water and swam around to these bars that were on the side of the boat.

I still don't really fully understand why, but there were a lot of people who were really scared of scuba diving, despite the fact that we had just bungy jumped the night before! I was a little worried I wouldn't be able to go if my ears wouldn't adjust properly, but a lot of people were worried about the breathing and such. And in fact a lot of people got into the water and got right back out again within a couple minutes. That's what Jess in our group ended up doing, I guess a lot of people just couldn't deal with the breathing. Because she left it was just me, Katie, and Alex with our instructor. She had us acclimate to the breathing for quite a while, testing out how to blow air into your goggles, clear your air if it falls out of your mouth, and popping our ears. From there we slowly went down to a bar which was probably around 7 feet below us. I had issues with my ears at first so I had to do it in smaller steps, but it was fine once I got down there.

From there we all hooked arms and set off at a very leisurely pace. I had managed to get my underwater camera to reload this time, so I have a bunch of pictures from this, but I haven't gotten them developed yet - maybe I'll come back and put some of those up here. I'm pissed though because I ran out of film RIGHT as we came up to see Nemo! I was admittedly so excited to see clown fish though haha. I saw some in the Melbourne aquarium this past weekend but they weren't as big or bright as the ones in the reef I saw. They were really cute :D. We also saw a bunch of those HUGE sea clams that snap shut when you disturb them. Other than that nothing too dramatic, but it was a really awesome experience to be able to do that. I'm also sorry to say I didn't remember to get someone to take my picture, and the underwater photographer who was supposed to take your picture never came up to us while we were underwater. Lame.

I know it was probably closer to half an hour, but it literally felt like we were only down there for 5 minutes. We reluctantly climbed back on the boat, but we had a delicious lunch waiting for us. We hung out for a bit, and then got back in the water with just a snorkel and flippers this time. They had said we would be at that spot all day, so I picked up one of the noodles which I don't normally like, but I figured I could just float and chill for a while. That would have been fine, except that by the time we got out to where everyone else was, we heard a whistle and realized they were calling us all back in. So we had to swim quite a distance, against the current, fighting that stupid noodle the whole way. Turns out they had decided to move to another spot after all, so I rested up top for a while and then jumped back in once we got there. This was sort of short-lived because once I got to the reef area and started looking around a bit, I heard Jan-Erik shout out "Hey look! there's a big jelly over here!" so I duck down under the water, and sure enough about three feet away is a huge jelly fish. I fought with myself for a second on whether I should get like a foot closer so I could take a picture, but couldn't fight the 'get the hell out of here' response, and turned tail and swam all the way back again, this time thankfully with the current.

After that thankfully I wasn't feeling seasick at all anymore, and I just enjoyed the long ride back to port. We walked back and got ready for our pubcrawl we had that night. It started at the bar at our hostel, where they had a BBQ for us and they had a few people do a game - they did something along those lines at every bar we went to. We also had a bunch of vouchers for drinks, and a lot of the places had some sort of deal set up for us. I think the pubcrawl was 5 bars in total, and we were taken to each one via the same open-air double decker bus we had taken to bungy jumping the night before. It was a ton of fun, we met some of the other people who weren't in our group but on the crawl with us, like this group of guys from New Zealand. They gave us pizza at the second to last bar, and we ended at the Woolshed, which had sort of become our homebase for our time in Cairns between dinners, nights out, and our final party the last day.