Jamie and I
were still undecided about whether or not to wear stinger suits. After all the
stinger season was almost over and we’d swam at Whitehaven beach with no
problems. So we made the decision not to have them. At the last minute as we
collected our masks and fins and were making our way to the back of the boat to
jump in I changed my mind. So we had a very attractive stinger suit each – again.
A bit of spit
in your mask (I’m not disgusting this is to stop the masking fogging), fins on
and I jumped into the water, closely followed by Jamie. I’d swum about 5 metres
from the boat when I came face to
“face” with a stinger – a box jellyfish. Jellyfish are one of my worst fears,
definitely in the top 5! I froze
for a few seconds, just watching it float towards me, not actually believing
what I was seeing, then I swam like hell! Once I felt that I was a safe
distance away I shouted to Jamie to warn him. So luckily we had changed our
minds and had the stinger suits! Needless to say that there are no photos of
the stinger!
Then the crew
member who was manning the glass bottom boat shouted over to us and gestured to
“swim over there”, pointing in the other direction as there was a sea
turtle. We swam over and spotted a
massive sea turtle gliding majestically through the water. He was huge, and had
algae growing on his shell. Jamie swam right up close to him, I snapped away.
There were
loads of fish and coral near to the surface and the sea was calm, which made
snorkeling so much easier than when we were getting battered by the waves in
Cairns. There were shoals of big fish swimming with us, getting really close –
it was awesome!
We snorkeled
for about 2 hours and then headed back to the boat. There was about a 5 metre
swim between where the coral was at its higher levels and the boat, that area
was just darkness, you could see some fish swimming, but they very far down… it
was scary to think of what might be lurking in the dark depths and it was where
I had spotted the stinger.
We got
back on board thankfully only spotting some more big fish. Once we were back on
board we chatted with the crew, intrigued to find out which fish we had seen.
We had seen a really large black fish, the crew told us it was a ‘GT’. A Giant Trevally fish. They have razor sharp tails, if you were fishing them you’d have
to wear gloves to pick it up or it would slice up your hand. The large black fish is the alpha male
of the group. If the alpha male gets killed, fished, etc then one of the
females will become male, turn black and take his place.
One of the
crew admired my amber bracelet. He had a necklace with a piece of amber on it.
He said that he had found the amber himself on a beach in Queensland.
Queensland amber is a darker more orangey red, than any amber that I have seen.
He said that after a storm you can find it on some beaches in Queensland – he
didn’t reveal which beaches though! I would love to have a go at amber scavenging.
I didn’t have
an underwater digital camera with me this time, just an underwater disposable
film camera. It was a nightmare to try and look through the viewfinder with a
snorkel mask on, however I’m pretty pleased with the photos!
Then we headed
back to Airlie. We sat on the top deck with the skipper for a little while, but
then the waves started to pick up and we got soaked, so we headed back
down. The waves got bigger and
bigger and people were falling all over the place, in the end everyone just
stayed wherever they landed! The motion of the ocean got the better of one lady
who spent the journey back with her head in a bag….. on a lighter note we were
fine!
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