Day 2 - Great Barrier Reef

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We started the day with an early dive at 7 am. I think today is going to be the roughest day, with the cyclon just in front of us (although still at a considerable distance), the waves are quite high sometimes and when we were coming back and were about to do the 3 min break at 5 m the first one on the group grabbed one of the lines at 5 meters to initiate the 3 min stop and along came a wave and pulled the line (and the diver with it) all the way to the surface, the rest saw that and decided to just keep diving and stay at 5 m without grabbing ourselves onto anything just in case.

I can say without a doubt that the seasick medication WORKS! the boat is moving about all the time, up and down right to left and I haven't had any problems so far, I´ve been reading, typing on the computer, etc... when normally as soon as one wave hits the boat I'm the first one to embrace the toilet and leave my guts there together with breakfast/lunch or dinner or feed the fish depending on whether I make it all the way to the toilet on time... The wonders of modern medicine, seasick medication! :-)

The second dive was the worst one I've ever done so far. It was the first time I started the diving from a dingy and rolling backwards which was without any doubt the highligt of that dive for me. As soon as we went down, we started drifting with the current, it was a very strong current. The closer to the coral the less strong the current is but I was trying to stay away from the coral because I didn't want to bump into it. I still don't feel totally confident on controlling my body underwater when there is a strong current so in a nutshell I spent the whole time swimming against the current just to stay still, it was exhausting, the dive master was asking me to get closer to the coral but I didn't trust myself so 25 minutes later I was like someone who just run a marathon and I asked the dive master to let me go up...and he tried to convince me to stay longer...amazingly enough despite of all the effort I still had quite a little bit of air left in the tank, then is when I BEGGED him to let me go!. I think I may have just invented the underwater sign for it because he did understand me, they are going to have to update all the underwater manuals with my new sign. :-)

I was having a hard time and I didn't enjoy it at all...so in the end he let me go. I need to practice diving on a strong current but I don't think that's gonna be a problem with these strong winds. :-)

I´m the one on the bottom right corner holding the rope as tight as I could to avoid going to the water before time...

The third dive was a close call, I spent too much time at 20m and started to run out of air pretty quickly so by the time I made it back to the boat I only had 10 bar left...I almost run out of air...the last 5 minutes or so I went up to 5m to save air and do the 5m stop on the move, on the way to the boat and in case I had to do an emergency exit I was ready for it. This was also a NIGHT dive and we also started the dive from a dingy. The first part of the dive was good and I got to see a lot of big fishes, the second part I was only watching the computer to make sure I was at the right depth to get rid of the nitrogen and the tank to make sure I could make it on time. There were very strong waves on the surface so it was difficult to get out of the water and get onto the boat (specially when you are running out of air) :-)

A bit stresfull but all in all, a cool dive. :-)


These are Carlos and Karin they are both from Sao Paulo, really nice guys. You can thank Carlos for many of the underwater pictures.

Barracudas:

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