His Thoughts of the Liveaboard

The whole liveaboard scuba adventure was great, and I would recommend it to anyone! Having been scuba certified for 7 years now, I have been diving many times and in several different places around the world. What I noticed most about the Great Barrier Reef (in comparison to other places) is the size of the sealife, including corals and individual fish. I did not see as much of the teeming schools as I have seen in the Caribbean, but I was amazed at the size of many of the fish I did see.

Anyway, I completed all 11 dives offered during our cruise. The first one made me very apprehensive. Before we booked, ProDive told us that the first day and first night dive would be led and chaperoned by a dive instructor. The rest would be done just with your dive buddy or a group you organized on your own. But we got separated from our dive instructor on the first dive, as well did everyone else, and were given bad instructions (because of a changed mooring position) so we saw little reef and alot of blue water. In fact, we had to signal for a pickup because we surfaced so far from the boat. However we did see a large manta ray while in the deep, which no one else did. That was the first I had ever seen, so it was great and worth the bad advice.

Afterwards, everything was fine. I was the leader of our dives, at Kelly's request, and actually I got fairly good by the third day of using the compass and directions given to us to see everything. We have all of the stuff we saw written in our dive log books, but I will recount a few. On both night dives (which I did with another dive buddy, not Kelly), I saw sharks, including a nurse and whitetip reef shark. These were the first night dives I had ever done; it was actually no problem at all. Together Kelly and I saw sharks during the day on two separate occasions, including a whitetip and a very large grey reef shark in very shallow water on our last dive. We were able to see green turtles feeding on coral and swimming to the surface on multiple occasions, and it was awesome to see Kelly's expression every time. She loved them! We were also able to see jellyfish and HUGE Maori wrasse and giant trevally. And of course we saw hundreds of different kinds of small fish. As a previous diver, this was actually the best part of the liveaboard situation for me. You knew that you had multiple dives ahead of you, so you did not have to concentrate on only finding the big things because you knew you had so many future chances. Instead, you could enjoy the multitudes of small fish and coral and just wait for the big things to find you.

With that being said, we were VERY lucky a second time as well (beside the manta ray sighting). On one dive, we got sucked out to slightly deeper water by a current on the outside of the reef. We signalled for another pickup, which means being towed through the water on a rope behind a small motorized dinghy back to the main boat. When the instructor came to get us, she was screaming. Apparently a dwarf minke whale had surfaced 2 meters (6 feet) behind us while she was motoring out. How a 7-meter-long whale surfaces right behind you without one knowing seems difficult to believe, but the captain later verified this sighting from the top of the main boat. So we missed out, yes. But as we were beig towed in, the instructor stopped the dinghy because the whale was following us somewhat. We were able to turn arouind, put our heads under the water, and see the whale swimming! Obviously few people get to ever experience this, but that did not matter to me. It was just plain beautiful! As we got back to the main

ship, we sailed to another mooring. Then three dwarf minke whales circled the boat and swam undfr it for several minutes. I have some camcorder footage I whill share when we return. It was amazing!

All in all, it ws great. Sometimes it was a little busy underwater with 30 other divers on board. But the food was good, the weather and ocean were beautiful, the company was great as was the staff. And we got to sun on the top deck waiting for the next dive while reliving the last one. I can't wait to do it again in the future, especially with Kelly! For someone who had been in the open ocean on only two other occasions (in Fiji), she did an amazing job keeping up with the rigor of 6am wake-up calls and daily gear preps we had to do on our own, not to mention not freaking out underwater with sharks.

--Alan