Walking Around Cairns

To the right of the marina, the walkway along the water continues past the construction zone, paralleling the ocean. Cairns has no natural beach there used to be a mangrove forest along the water and now it is just empty mud flats, so the ocean isn’t a real pretty view. You can’t swim in the ocean, especially because crocodiles live in mud. Just beyond the marina begins a long park that the walkway runs through. The park goes on for quite a ways. In the section of the park closest to the marina there is an enormous “lagoon”, which is a man made shallow swimming pool that has a small bit of sand on one side to give it a beach feel. This picture only shows a small portion of the “lagoon”. The pool is really nice and it seems to always be packed with people.

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There are a lot of trees in the park. Most of them look newer, like they were recently planted, but there are also quite a few older trees. The more mature trees have heaps of birds in them, and as you walk along the boardwalk they all chirp so loudly that it seems like they are screaming at one another. If you look carefully, you can see Continue reading

Diving the Barrier Reef and Eating Bugs

Continued from yesterday”¦..

After the second dive lunch was served. It was a nice lunch with salad fixings and sandwich fixings, pasta salad and potato salad. We scarfed our food while the boat traveled to the next site, called Gone Again.

Forty minutes after finishing the last dive, we were back in for the third dive. Talk about pushing the limits on the surface interval between dives! This was another Continue reading

Diving the Great Barrier Reef

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

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

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