Finally! Time for some serious fun. Or so we thought…
Although we did not win the lottery (although it is soooo
expensive you feel you should have), we booked the premium Australia diving
holiday: 4 day dive trip to the outer Coral sea. It is actually so far that you
fly back to Cairns as they do not have time to drive you back (yes, baby!).
Also, no diving on the inner Barrier reef (heaven for discover scuba and open
water diver courses, for non-divers this means ruined coral and less fish),
only outer (the real stuff).
Needless to say, we were pretty hyped up. By the time trip
started we were so eager to go under we were practically seeing sharks walking
the Cairns streets. But afraid Barrier reef did not live up to our
expectations. Yeah, we know – two moaners again… Here it is why. Visibility was
not what we were hoping for and fish life was far from what we believed it would
be. By no means it is bad diving by any standard, but it is also not top world
class (or even best in the world) as it is usually presented to be. And when
you think of the price, it probably has really bad value in ‘what you get for
the price’ box. And at one point it looked the whole thing will be a complete
flop.
During out trip wind was blowing from the side it never
blows from (our weather luck is really starting to annoy us!!!), so we could
not do the usual shark feed (we could not approach the site due to high seas). This
is the place they do it with all the security precautions in place. Everybody
was really down. So, dive guides decided to drop the tuna head in the water within
the lagoon eager to “tick the box” and stop the mutiny, but really not
expecting anything. Safety speech was about 30 seconds long, guides didn’t even
bother to go into the water – this did not sound like safety obsessed Australia.
Nor did it look like shark feed safety bonanza we saw on previous tour video. To
our amazement sharks did come and we could be really close to them during the
feeding frenzy (very smart, right?). Fist row seats in the one of the best
nature cinemas. One of the guys on the trip was a return guest and said this
experience was far superior to the ‘regular’ one. Is our luck finally changing?
Diving time passed quickly (as it usually does) and we were
already on a small plane back to Cairns. This was amazing! Flying so low and
close to the reef you could see schools of dolphins and manta rays. Just
beautiful! Definitely should do this again when we win the lottery for real.
We did not have a lot of time in Cairns – just to grab a
rent a car and go quickly to the south. Yongala, here we come. For non-diving
community this is one of the most famous wreck dives in the world, arguably the
best one. Wreck is on the sandy bottom with nothing for miles around. Which
will bring down the visibility just to a few meters close to bottom. As
expected it has abundant fish and coral. Dare I even say it has one of the
biggest fish density we ever saw. When we were about to jump in dive guides
started rushing us as there was a sea-snake on the surface (To Nives’ horror).
We were in quite a few minutes later when snake disappeared. This being
Australia, all penetration is forbidden (5000AUD fine) – here we go with that
safety again. Is it our favourite wreck dive? Definitely not. But still worth
doing, we feel. Especially the fish side of it.
And that was that for diving in Australia. As planned, we
did not do a lot (way too expensive). It is safe to say we expected more, but
in the end still pleased we did the lot.
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