marinegirl

I had an AMAZING time last week - diving the outer reef with the JCU dive club on a boat called Kalinda.The weather was perfect at the start of the week, so the first stop on monday was the Yongala wreck, which totally deserves its reputation as one of the world’s best dive sites… it was absolutely fantastic! There’s usually quite a strong current over the wreck, but on our afternoon dive it was perfectly still, not a breath of current. You can barely see the wreck itself, because it’s completely covered in colourful soft corals, anemones and sponges, and huge shoals of silvery fusiliers and snappers mmake walls of fish which move and scatter as you swim through. And then there’s the big stuff. Groupers that are easliy bigger than me hiding in holes in the wreck glaring at you with their ugly faces, reef sharks and huge trevallys dart in from the blue water around to snatch little fish, and a couple of big green turtles swimming leisurely through everything. There was just so much to see it was impossible to take it all in on one dive, I could spend weeks on this site! Unfortunately you’re not allowed to go anywhere where your bubbles might touch the wreck (because it’s a grave, and they’re worried about it deteriorating), so I had to just peer into the holes in the wreckage.We then got another chance to dive the Yongala… at night. The current had picked up a bit, so we had to move carefully around staying close to the wreck to avoid getting ‘blown away’. The huge trevallys were in full hunting mode, and were using our lights to pick off little fish, so lots of them would come racing at you out of the darkness and turn right at the last minute - pretty scary! After a while we learnt to have fun by lighting up a little fish and watching as everything scrambled to eat it! There were about 10 of us in the water at once, so the wreck was lit up with a multi coloured lightshow of cyalume sticks and torch beams, which would flash like crazy when someone found something good. As we were returning back along the top edge of the deck to the shot line we found three or four huge bull rays hovering over the to pof the wreck feeding in the current, all stacked up like pancakes. It was just breathtaking to watch. They didn’t seem at all put off by us, and one brushed right past me.After a bumpy interrupted nights sleep, we woke up on the outer reef, where the water is clearest and there’s most to see. Typically we would do a couple of dives in the morning, move a bit, do an afternoon and night dive and then move further up the reef overnight. Some of the dive sites were just breathtaking, straight out of finding nemo! I can’t describve them all here or I’d go on forever! Beautiful reef drop-offs, enquisitive little reef sharks, clouds of bright blue damselfish hovering over coral bommies, quite a few turtles and rays, big pufferfish, enormous groupers and plenty of anemonefishes. Several sites had amazing caves and tunnels in the reef that you could swim through and find lots of little fishes hiding in the darkness. Unfortunately I don’t have many photos, cos my camera housing flooded Hopefully I’ll get some from the others on the trip.All in all it was an exhausting, but very fun week. Met lots of fun people too. Unfortunately it’s taken me nearly a week to get over my landsickness!