Hello again!
I suppose before I get to what happened today, I should back track a little bit ... I haven't been very dilligent on posting lately.
I am now living in north Queensland, Australia in a place called Cairns (pronounced "cans" by the locals). I've been up here for a couple of months working on a dive boat that makes daily trips out to the Great Barrier Reef. With the exception of the long days, hard work and low pay it's pretty much my dream job! I now live in an apartment with three flatmates, and though I miss the social aspects of living in hostels I absolutely relish having a room all to myself.
So: today. It all started out normally enough, I taught people how to scuba dive, saw some cool stuff like sharks, giant clams, moray eel etc etc. Then at lunch time when we were moving to another location the skipper randomly asked four of us to jump off the back of the boat in scuba gear to explore a coral bommie formation he had noticed on his sonar. As far as we knew it was unexplored.
The four of us jumped off the back of the boat, but I was the only one who actually found the bommie. It was amazing! I knew I was close when I saw a massive shimmering shoal of fish darting this way and that and swirling around in unison. They were about a foot and a half away from the surface of the coral, and the shoal itself was nearly a foot thick. These fish were tiny, the size of my pinky finger.. to fill that much space and move all together like that was amazing... there must have been millions of them. I saw a school of tuna fish, baracudas, and unicornfish as well. The coral bommie has two peaks, both starting at around 14m and cover a distance about the size of an olympic swimming pool. I felt like a pioneer in an unknown land until I noticed an abandoned mooring line nestled between the two peaks.. though it's pretty hard to be disappointed. It was glorious. Diving alone is not advisable, so I surfaced after a few laps of the area and was promptly picked up by the boat (sad face, I would have loved another half an hour down there). As I was climbing aboard, we noticed a few dozen dolphins jumping and playing right behind us! On a gorgeous sunny day on the great barrier reef.. somebody pinch me. I'm at work! I was beaming for the rest of the day.
Tomorrow I have a day off and I'll finally start exploring the surrounding areas of Cairns. I'm heading north towards Cape Tribulation to see the Daintree rainforrest. I hope to see crocodiles, snakes and other tropical creatures, but I sincerely hope to avoid spotting a 'bird eating spider'!