GBR and Coral Sea

 Hello!

We are back on land in Cairns. Tomorrow morning we have a very early wake-up for our flights to Denpasar, Bali.

We had such a good time on the Spirit of Freedom.  We visited dive sites along the Great Barrier Reef, Ribbon Reef, Bouganville and Holmes Reefs, the later two in the Coral Sea (100+ miles offshore).

We did 22 dives total this past week, including one night dive with lots of silver-tip and white-tip sharks.  Kind of creepy at night, but they were uninterested in us ... more in the prey we were lighting up with our flashlights.

Here are some pictures to give you a sample of what we saw:














We had a super time and great dives.  This boat did their dives a bit differently, instead of following a dive leader, they simply talked about the dive, showed us a map of sorts and told us to be back to the surface in 60-70 minutes.  This meant that we were on our own ... we had to find our way back to the boat ... of course, there were layers of safety back-up. If we had to come up because we were running out of air and were nowhere near the boat, they would send a tender to pick us up.  
This only happened once and 6 out of the 14 divers in the water were "lost" together. LOL. I surfaced first and told the mate that there were 6 of us! His face was priceless!  We each thought the other knew where they were going ... none of us actually had a clue. Oh well!
A great week of diving, food and conversation!

Next stop, Bali!

More later -
Sheri & Carsten

 


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