Great Barrier Reef - a day of firsts

Sorry, photos for this post will have to wait for a later date. 

In Cairns, we woke at 6:00 in the morning to board a Catamaran for a 2+ hour trip to the Great Barrier Reef. We made our first dive on the GBR just after lunch. Jack and I found Nemo (maybe 3/4" long), fortunately with his very nervous looking parents.  The girls spotted sea turtles. Visibility was not great due to the recent cyclone, but the corals are abundant, highly varied and still thriving compared some places we have been.

Our third dive was a night dive (AK, Zoe and Jack's first). Afterward, we found out the kids were terrified. Thank goodness we didn't see sharks which we were told is common at night. We all saw the Southern Cross for the first time through dive masks floating in the Pacific Ocean. Thankfully, I had a mask with corrective lenses.

We spent the night on a big (80-foot, 60-person) catamaran (AK, Zoe and Jack's first sleep aboard) softly rolling behind the protection of the Great Barrier Reef.

After a little grumbling, the 6:00 am dive was the most brilliant. The fish were active and hungry. For some reason the visibility had increased 6 to 8 fold.

We ended up with 6 dives and a snorkeling outing. It was great!  We all eventually saw sea turtles.

The GBR is beautiful like a garden of coral with fishes of every size, shape and color hovering in and around the corals like colorful butterflies, birds or lively fruits. Lots of vivid blues, greens, purples, yellows and oranges.  The corals are fortunately still alive, but showing stress from human activity. Scuba is so unnatural, breathing air from a tank 30 to 50 feet underwater with 2 to 3 atmospheres of pressure trying to infuse water into every pore and passage. It seems more apparent when you are trying to watch out for kids.

We ate excellent food on the boat, but then again we were so hungry and tired after diving, we would have eaten cooked shoe leather.  When we got back to Cairns we splurged and ate kangaroo (kind of like beefy venison), crocodile, and barramundi (a local fish I'm told can eat baby crocodiles, tasted kind of like walleye).