Back from the reef

We're back from an amazing adventure on the great barrier reef. We are exhausted but had such a wonderful time. I highly recommend doing this for 2 nights. 1 night isn't really enough and 3 nights would be too much.

We had to wake up for the 7:45am shuttle to take us to the boat station. We didn't have an alarm clock and by the time we realized the room we were staying in didn't have one, it was too late to buy one. We walked all around Cairns trying to find a place that was open but nothing. On our way back to the hostel it started to downpour. We ran as fast as we could but we were still drenched from head to toe. We both love the rain so it was pretty fun.

We ended up writing a note and sticking it on the door of the office asking them to wake us up when they open at 7am. We crossed our fingers and hoped it'd work. It was our last resort. We also hadn't been sleeping in much past 7:30 or 8 so we weren't too worried. We ended up waking up at 6am! wooohoooo!!! go us :)

We got on the shuttle with all our bags and hit the road to the office before being transferred to our first boat. We did 2 dives on the first boat which was filled with people on day tours as well as live aboard customers. 2 girls ended up getting sea sick while we were on the first boat and wanted a helicopter to come pick them up when the captain wouldn't turn the boat around (it's a 90 minute boat ride back). He called the heli office and it was going to cost $1180 to pick them up. I guess it was too much (no kidding) so they stayed on board.

Our first 2 dives went pretty quickly because we were so excited I think we used our air faster. We didn't really see anything big until we transferred to the other boat. We did 12 dives total, 4 on day 1, 5 on day 2, and 3 today. We did 2 night dives which were really cool. The night dive we did last night had a TON of sharks. I guess they have learned to use the boat's lights to hunt for fish. I got an awesome video just before we went in of 3 or 4 people in the water with 3-5 sharks swimming around and then a pipe fish comes flying out of the water trying to get away from the sharks and all the sharks go swimming after it.

What we saw:

Sharks- Tons of them
Nemo - :)
Turtles- Sooooo peaceful
Flounder
Clams- SO BIG ("as big as a truck tire"-Cam)
Sting Rays
Lobsters
Tons of different fish
an Octopus

There were a lot of other things we saw but I can't think of them all right now. We weren't really on the boat that much because we were in the water most of the time. Our first dive was at 6am and our last dive was at 7pm. We would wake up and dive, eat breakfast, go for 2 dives before lunch, eat lunch, go for another dive, eat dinner, go for another dive, then eat dessert. By this time everyone was asleep by 9:30-10pm to wake up again at 5:50am.

We're killing time right now until our bus at midnight back to Townsville. Our bus arrives in Townsville at around 5:30am and we'll head to Magnetic Island at that point for 2 days. We're not quite sure what we'll be doing there yet, mainly relaxing, snorkeling, and exploring. I think we're going to meet up with some people we met on the boat tonght for dinner.