Lady Elliott Island: Diving

This trip had been planned exclusively to get more diving in on the Great Barrier Reef here in Australia.  As Laura does not like being on a boat for very long, we chose Lady Elliot Island because, although you dive from a boat you gear up on land and are shuttled back to shore as soon as the dive is over.  If we had gone north to Townsville or Cains, we would have to been on an overnight boat trip to dive on the reef up there. 

We meet at the dive shop at 7:30 AM to get our gear picked out and put together.  It was still very windy, so we were headed to the leeward side of the island for calmer seas.  We were told that in the winter the ocean is often like glass on the leeward side.  Not so today, but that doesn’t matter once you are under the water.  Once in the water, I had a slight mishap of not having enough weight on me and I could not sink.  I added a weight to my BCD and we were off.  We dove today along second reef and swam along with the current along the reef.  Laura and I quickly remembered how to keep ourselves off the coral in neutral buoyancy and we were able to enjoy the sea life.  We both agreed the fish were more colorful here than we had seen off the Keppel islands.  Visibility was 15-20 meters and the highlights included a reef shark, huge sea cucumbers, a blue starfish and schools of tiny blue and purple shimmering fish.

Back on land we took hot showers to rinse off and warm up, and then we relaxed with our morning tea and books while waiting for the afternoon dive.

We headed out to Mauri Wrasse on the North-West side the island for our afternoon dive.  The current was heading south, so we drifted with it through arches down to second reef.  Laura and I both really enjoyed this dive; we were used to being underwater and could really concentrate on the sealife.  We saw a huge grouper tucked away inside an arch, lots of turtles (green and loggerhead) a few which allowed us to scratch their backs and numerous schools of colorful fish.