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| The Great Barrier Reef (or at least a little part of it) |
Diving the Great Barrier Reef is part bucket list, part "not like it used to be" (no place is - you hear this everywhere you go), and is mostly wonderful and "is-what-it-is". Going to the outer reef and further north helps to get into less visited waters and corals that are in better shape. I'll save all of the fishy pictures for the end, but here are a few highlights.
Sharks! Who doesn't love to see something as sleek and top-of-the-food-chain. We had a couple of dives centered around sharks, but they could be seen on most dives.
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| Shark feeding |
Jumbo cod! Mostly really big potato cod, but the biggest one I saw was a Queensland Cod that looked to be the size of a small car.
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potato cod
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And mostly, beautiful and diverse corals and multitudes of fish of all sorts. To be honest, neither were as good as I've seen in other places, like the coral diversity or fish density in Palau, or the sea life diversity in Bali and Indonesia - but still an awesome place to dive where I got to see many things I'd never seen before - and many others that I never get tired of seeing.
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| Staghorn coral |
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Octopus
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| Leaf scorpion fish |
This was never meant to be a diving trip so much as a discover Australia trip, tand diving was definitely a big part of that - though if I'd come here only to dive and skipped the other chapters, I would have felt short-changed for sure.
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Mike Ball Dive Expedition's boat SpoilSport
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One of the best parts of any liveaboard trip is meeting other divers from around the world. One of the best parts of traveling solo is that you tend to connect with other solo travelers who are less focused on their partners or groups. Below is Lisa from Ohio who was my dive buddy for most of the 20+ dives, Sam from Atlanta (by way of Utah), and Sophia from Paris.
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| dive buddies |
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