Thoughts, Rants and Subliminal Suggestions

Whale Sharks are da Bomb!!!!

Wow, I have had such a totally cool past couple of days. The whole group of us went on a dive boat for several days of diving on Ningaloo Reef. This place is totally an undiscovered jewel, Jon even says that it is better than the Great Barrier Reef that he's seen. We were supposed to be camping on the Murion Islands but the weather and water was so rough that it had to be scratched. It was so bad that on our way out to the first dive we had several people yakking over the side. I am not ashamed to admit that I was one of them..... I did feel better afterward. The diving was awesome!!!!! I'll save the details for later. The second day of diving was also really cool and I had the most awesome experience. For a bit extra, $60, I was able to do a Night Dive on Ningaloo. OMG... It was so thrilling to be down there. The first thing I see? An itty bitty octopus the size of my thumbnail crawling on my gauges. It proceeded to crawl behind my dive computer and hide there the entire dive. We were also constantly surrounded by these little red worms. Kind of cool at first, then totally annoying because they got into my hair, my ears, the cracks in my mask EVERYWHERE. They were also attracted to our dive lights so we could never really see anything because there was just a glowing red mass. We saw a sleeping lionfish, a HUGE grouper, two sea turtles, the first one was sleeping. We woke them up. Later we turned off the lights and there was bioilluminescence in the water!! That was cool.

Today was totally awesome. I slept on board the dive boat in a swag with the other four people who also stayed for the night dive. We were woken up in time to see sunrise over Ningaloo. Awesome. Then, we switched boats to Isabella Darling for Whale Shark swimming. THAT WAS SO COOL!!! There are no words to describe the feeling as you're snorkeling through deep blue water and out of nowhere appears this creature that's completely harmless. And it doesn't care that you're swimming along side it as it feeds. Those short times I was in the water with the shark made this trip so completely worth the price. I don't even care anymore that I was stung to high heaven by the mother-lovin box jellies. God that hurt, it felt like I was on fire. Especially when I was nailed on my underarm, but it also gave me more energy as I cursed those stupid inverts to swim and catch up with the shark :-) . We even got to swim with a manta ray and on the last swim with the shark I watched as it dove down to 10 meters to check out a sea turtle, passed it, then rose back up to about 2-3 m . Those images will never leave me. Unfortunately, due to my night dive and staying on the boat, all of my clothes, and my underwater camera, were not with me. ARRRGGHHHHH. Luckily other people took photos so I'm getting copies of those. Yay!

Well, I'm REALLY tired right now, thank goodness I've taken a shower and shaved and all that wonderful stuff. I'm not even in my bathing suit anymore, which I have been for the last 50 hours or so. Ick. I'm going to bed. Again, add 12 hours to the timestamp.

posted by Amy M @ 7:47 AM