Monday, November 19, 2007

Diving Day Two: A Large Place with Large Animals

A wake up knock and some eye rubbing and we were once again in the deep blue. The morning dives were at False Entrance and Admiralty Anchor. The latter was appropriately named for an ancient anchor lodged deep into a coral tunnel.

During the night Skip ferried us north in the Coral Sea to Osprey Reef. At this point I believe we were about 16-18 hours away from the mainland of Australia. So this is certainly not the type of diving you could get on a day trip. In fact, while we were in a dive shop in Port Douglass the shop owner commented how badly she wanted to dive Osprey Reef. The irony is that if you have a dive shop to run and only have access to day boats, you’d never make it out this far. We felt extremely fortunate to be there.

Within minutes of descending onto False Entrance we saw two white tip reef sharks resting on the bottom. Then another. And another.

The coral heads were split by a large sand channel that dropped off onto an enormous wall. I was a little startled to see that we were down at 115 feet and there was still this massive wall well below us.

White tip cruising the wall

Diving offers an amazing freedom of weightlessness and sometimes there is very little natural indication of depth and speed of the current. Any diver, even the most careful, will tell you that they have at some point looked at their dive computer with a slight bit of shock. We are very vigilant divers, but every once in a while we’ll enjoy the environment so much that we’ll have to course correct. I personally find that after about 45 feet my body doesn’t feel much affect from the changes in water pressure. So I could go from 50 feet to 150 feet and not notice unless I looked at my computer or had some natural structure for a frame of reference. I’ve now established a sort of an internal clock that keeps me checking my dive computer periodically.

After ascending to 50-60 feet we enjoy the density of marine life for a while and made our way back to the boat.

At Admiralty Anchor we dropped in and encountered a stronger current. The coral heads were tall and immense. We dove this site twice and on the second dive we entered the swim through to find the “anchor.” We also some more white tips and a lionfish.

Later in the afternoon we dove at a site called North Horn which I will talk about in detail later.

After a couple days of diving I found myself struck by the size of the reefs and how you could be on the edge of a reef and its jade green color would sprawl out toward horizon as far as the eye could see. Just magnificent.

Overlooking the reef

Amy engaged in our daily ear-drying ritual


Sweetlips

The aforementioned anchor


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