Monthly Archives: November 2007

Diving the Great Barrier Reef

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The Great Barrier Reef is made up of about 2900 separate reefs. Some are barrier reefs, which run along the Australian continental shelf and separate the ocean from the mainland, and the rest are fringing reefs, located within the lagoon created by the barrier reefs. It is one of the seven wonders of the natural world. It stretches for 2000 kilometers from the tropic of Capricorn to just south of Papua New Guinea and is the most extensive reef system in the world. Within the Barrier Reef are 1500 species of fish, 400 types of coral, 4,000 breeds of mollusks, 800 Echinoderms species (including sea cucumbers), 500 varieties of seaweed, 200 bird species, 1500 sponge species, 30 plus marine mammal species and 118 species of butterflies. The diving within the reef is supposed to be extraordinary with so many colorful things to see in the water.

Being as avid of a diver as Jaime is, he wasted no time in organizing a dive trip for us. We had been told that Continue reading →

Customs and Quarantine in Australia

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Cairns (pronounced Cans) is located in the state of Queensland on the northeastern coast of Australia, inside the Great Barrier Reef. When the English first began settling Australia, a penal colony was established in the south of the state. From there, graziers, miners and small farmers pushed farther west and north into what is now the state of Queensland. Mining that continues today includes coal, copper, zinc and lead. Farming includes meat, wheat, and sugar. Cairns was originally established as a port town to export goods produced in the general region, being ideally situated where the mouth of a river meets the bay, with a wide channel through the reef out to the ocean. Products could be sent to Cairns via rail or boat, and then loaded onto cargo ships for export. Today, Cairns has become one of the most popular tourist destinations in all of Australia. Queensland has a population of approximately 3.86 million people. The city of Cairns only accounts for about 100,000 of those people.

Customs and quarantine were at the boat within a few minutes of our arrival to clear us in. All of them were very nice, offering all kinds of helpful information. All were professional and proficient at their jobs. The quarantine officer asked to see the food stores, then began systematically going through all the food. We had been clever and cooked up everything that we knew would get confiscated. We found out Continue reading →

Welcome to Cairns, Queensland, Australia

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On days 6 and 7, the seas went from really uncomfortable to quite miserable. Seas were 10 to 12 feet and confused, with lots of those nasty big beam waves. While Eric was in the shower we were hit with one of those big waves. Eric said the boat rolled over so far on its side that the porthole (window) was completely underwater. Jaime said one of the most memorable moments of his time with us is standing at the back of the boat watching the huge waves go up way over the top of Kosmos.

On days 8 and 9 we had several neighbors drop by to say hello. Here are shots of a couple of them (notice the lime green feet).

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Of course, they were kind enough to Continue reading →

Vanuatu to Cairns Dolphin Show

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Today is day five of nine on the passage from Vanuatu to Australia. To celebrate making it to the halfway mark, we had a pod of dolphins come and do a show for us. Eric and Jaime spotted the dolphins at about 14:30 (2:30 pm). We went outside to get a better look. There was a big pod of them surfing the waves around us. Many of them stuck their noses out of the water and dived down, arching their backs out of the water, as they surfed along. A couple of them even turned mid stream so we could see their belly arch out of the water instead of their backs, which was exciting because we haven’t seen them do that before. Out of nowhere, one of the dolphins fully jumped straight up out of the water, fully vertical to the sea, and several feet up. We were all stunned. After that initial breach, the dolphins put on quite the show for us. There were several more fully body breaches like the first one. There were several partial body breaches where they seemed to stick their heads up out of the water to say hi. They would sometimes dive forward off the top of a cresting wave, which would send them flying up about a foot above the descending water level before they plunged back into the ocean. They seemed to be having a lot of fun playing in the waves and showing off for us.

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All the other dolphins we have seen seem to Continue reading →

Passage from Luagnville, Vanuatu to Cairns, Australia

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We left for a nine day passage to Cairns, Australia. Being that it is such a long passage, we had some serious getting ready to do. We spent all day Thursday and most of the day Friday doing chores.

Jaime volunteered to scrub the waterline, which delighted Christi. Christi thinks that the waterline is by far her hardest job duty. She was pretty happy about passing it off onto Adrienne, and even happier to have gotten out of it a second time in a row. He hopped in and hopped right back out, realizing that there was no way he could fight the aggressive two knot current. At slack tide he hopped in and got to work, but wasn’t able to finish the job before the tide picked back up. When the tide was slack again, he got in to finish the job. Jaime is planning on buying a Nordhavn and is trying to decide between a 43 and a 47. After finally completing the waterline, he came inside and announced that he had decided on the 43 he couldn’t possibly take doing the waterline of the 47, which is actually 50 and a half feet

Christi did the bottom when Jaime finished the water line. As she prepared to get in, she managed to break Continue reading →