Diving in the Great Barrier Reef
It may seem ridiculously obvious to anybody, that keeping your lips open while going underwater is a very effective way of getting salt water into your mouth. This is probably not what you ought to be doing when planning to go SCUBA diving. However, diving for the first time, in choppy seas, such logical thought processes end up going out of un-mentionable orifices, while water gets taken in through the aforementioned orifice.
This is kind of what happened to me when I went for my introductory dive this morning at the Reef. Despite loads of instructions by the instructor, it took me about three attempts before I relaized that when clenching the mouthpeice, I had forgotten to close my lips around it. I then pretended that the mouthpeice (or regulator, in diving parlance) were the lips of an extremely attractive woman, and closed my lips tightly around her, er, I mean the regulator.
After that everything was fine and I was on my way to a completely unbelievable experience. A few weeks ago, I had seen specimens of the reef at the Sydney acquarium, but seeing them in person, and going down and touching them was quite something else. I saw quite a few clown fish (now forever renamed to ‘Nemo’ thanks to the magicians at Pixar and the marketing gurus at Disney), a sleeping reef shark here and there, had my hand stuck to some sort of coral’s tentacles, forced a clam to close its shell, and held a sea cucumber in my hand. The water was pretty choppy up at the top, but down below it was pretty calm. Of course I had an instructor literally hold my hand all through the dives as I had horrible sense of balance and coordination, and as a result found myself almost destroying endangered species and scraping my body against numerous thinsg I really shouldn;t be scraping.
But diving is fun, and introductory dives in this sort of envioronment is extremely safe. I would definitely do it again, maybe even get myself certified.
The official photographer took several pictures of all of us diving and snorkeling, including an extremely embarrasing one of me snorkeling where it appeared as if I was running away from her when she came up to me with a sea cucumber. Truth is, with the choppy water I had salt water enter my snorkel and was trying to get it out. The problem, however, is that with all the gear, everyone looks alike in the photos. I thought being the only non-white/pale person on-board, I would be easy to identify, but underwater photography has a unique ability to hide the face and show only the masks, fins and other paraphanalia. I could have picked a picture of some of the pros diving and pass it off as mine, but instead I decided to be honest and got one of me diving… or at least I think it was me diving.
I shall put it up on this post shortly for you to poke fun at.