We headed over to the beach a little before 13:00 (1:00 pm). Everyone was gathered around a small picnic table under a tree on the beach. There were about 16 people there, all Australian retirees. We listened to the horse race on the radio, then hung out and chatted with everyone for a couple more hours. Everyone was really nice. Politics was at the forefront of everyone’s mind since Continue reading
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
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
This morning we were surprised to see two more people in the boat when they picked us up. One was diving with us, the other would be snorkeling. Christi and Jaime were going to go deeper into the Coolidge to see “the lady” with the same dive master we went in with yesterday. Eric and Darren were going out with another dive guider to do the promenade deck dive.
Eric and Darren descended from a nearby sand patch and followed a line that runs from shore to the bow, instead of going down the mooring line. Eric is more comfortable starting from shallow water and going deeper than he is starting in deep water. The descent was scary for him since he couldn’t see the bottom, just a nothingness of blue below. He was relieved when the ship came into sight. Eric made it abundantly clear that he did not want to go inside the ship at all he only wanted to swim around the exterior areas. They did the same the same route Jaime and Christi did the day before, except that they didn’t go into any of the cargo holds.
Christi and Jaime and the dive master again descended down the line to the bow. This time they continued over the starboard side of the boat, which is now the top since it is leaning on it’s side. They passed over a long series of portholes with the glass long gone. There was a cluster of colorful, pretty corals of assorted varieties at the edge of all the portholes. There were quite a few small clusters of coral over the top. Christi spotted a lionfish, which are neat to watch.
They came to a blast hole in the metal hull, where they descended straight down into the relatively dark interior. Once again, only Continue reading
At 0800, we were picked up by the dive company at Kosmos. Jaime is a dive master, but we still went with the local dive shop because we wanted to be with someone that knows the area. It was just the three of us with the local dive master. The boat ride over to the Coolidge was pretty short. From the surface, it didn’t look like there would be anything of interest. We tied to a mooring and went down the mooring line. The visibility was the worst we have seen yet in the entire South Pacific, but compared to San Diego, it was great. We couldn’t see the bottom from the surface, which made Eric nervous. He was already uncomfortable about going to a wreck dive where it would be easy to get trapped into a small space, and the lack of clarity pushed him over the edge and he decided to sit this one out.
Jaime and Christi descended the line, which was tied to a corner of the bow. The wreck wasn’t clearly visible until we got pretty close to it. From the corner you could swim over the top (which is the side of the boat), or continue descending to the foredeck. We continued descending. There were lots of fish around there were a couple of enormous angel fish, a big school of fusilier fish which are dark blue fish with bright yellow split tails, a few silver (trevallys) jacks, a tuna, a few parrotfish, and long nosed butterfly fish, to name a few of the species.
As they descended, the whole front of the ship came into clear view. The ship is absolutely massive. Christi felt like a small speck next to it. Christi and Jaime followed the local dive master as he swam over the foredeck, which still has equipment laying around ready for use. There is an anti-aircraft gun with a pile of large shells still stacked up ready for firing, gas masks and rifles lying about.
