World Cruise - Day 50 - Mar 2 - Cairns, Australia/Great Barrier Reef, Part 1

Sunrise was interesting this morning, since it was blocked by the islands around Cairns on the low side and the shrouding clouds on the topside:

We came into Cairns with the sky still cloudy:

We’re hoping for a good day out at the reef.  Sunshine isn’t needed, but clear weather would be helpful.  Divers are less affected by the weather than snorkelers (since it’s below the surface, rather than floating at the surface), but the visibility below is affected by the weather above.  Hopefully things will stay relatively clear for our dives later today.  We should have one dive in the morning, then lunch, then a dive in the afternoon.  We are very much looking forward to it.  Hopefully lots of great pics to follow!

Um, wow.  I don’t know where to start, other than to say that I will have a very difficult time narrowing down all of these pics.  Lots of pics of the Great Barrier Reef, which was outstanding!  I also met another diver named Ann Thilderkvist from Sweden who also had an underwater camera, so we shared each other’s photos.  Her underwater camera was better than mine (she had a 14MP camera, I had a 5MP camera), so the best pics you see below are probably hers.  I am seriously over 100 pics left (out of more than 600), I simply don’t know how/where to cut down further.  So I’ll see if this blog post goes through (it would be over 6MB, even compressing each pic to second level compression), if it doesn’t I will reformat it.

This is me during my first dive, Ann took it of me.  The weather was very warm and no jellyfish, so no need to where a wetsuit.

The coral reefs were incredible and always changing beneath us.

This was a giant clam, about four feet across.

Lots of varieties of fish.

Not sure what this was (vertical tube down the middle), but it looked like a bunch of stars in a roll.

The deeper we dived (we went down to about 45-50 feet), the more difficult it was to take pics, yet still plenty of coral and lots of fish.

Another sea clam.  You could touch it lightly on the inside and it would close slightly.

I have no idea what this is in the coral, but it’s pretty cool (that’s my consistent comment throughout, BTW).

This was a type of sea grass blowing in the currents, note the two cool fish just beyond to the right.

This almost looked like a sponge, but it was also coral.

Lots of interesting coral and fish.

This is Ann Thilderkvist (who took most of the pics above), who went along on our dive.

I know I should know the name of this fish, but I don’t.

Close-up of some of the brown and white coral.

Coral like this was all throughout the reef area.

Fan-like coral.

Yellow coral.

Cool fish.

Another one of those fish that I should know the name.

Sargent major and other fish in the background.

Again the fish with no name…

More coral, more colors.

More coral.  Do I really need to add commentary?  I don’t think it’s adding anything at this point…I’m just going to let the pics speak for themselves for awhile…

I really liked this fish, it was way cooler than this pic, this was the best I could do.

Another sea clam, great colors.

So I didn’t really see this sea turtle, this is someone else’s photo.

Another pic (someone else’s) of the sea turtle.

Dave was also part of our snorkeling group.

I had to split this posting into two parts due to the file limitations I have encountered at Blogger and with FeedBurner e-mails, so part 2 is in a separate posting, please keep reading…