Snorkelling at The Great Barrier Reef

Another one of the activities we wanted to do whilst in the North East of Australia was go out onto the Great Barrier Reef. We had a look into doing scuba diving but to get your PADI open water licence it was a 4 day course involving 2 days in a classroom and was out of our price range for this trip. In addition with the licence, you have to keep on diving to maintain it and that would be ok if we lived here but we didn't fancy diving in Scotland!

We therefore went for a whole day snorkelling with an introductory scuba dive and Ian and Amy came along with us. Again this was an early start and we had to be at the Marina for 7:30. After getting on the boat we were warned that the waters were very choppy and that there was free ginger tablets for anyone that thinks they may be sick. Me and Gemma thought that we would be ok as I had only been sea sick once before when I was about 12 and Gemma roughly the same. However it was a 90 minute journey out to the reef and after about 30 minutes Gemma had to run out the back to get some air. About 10 minutes later I followed. We were ok when we were outside but in order to be able to do the trial scuba dive you had to attend a safety briefing. This unfortunately was inside and we both struggled in. I think about 1 minute later I had to run out the door and spew everywhere! Therefore we missed the briefing but later on in the day we managed to catch another one in order to do the dive.

Once the boat eventually stopped it was time to jump in and snorkel. Here we seen a lot of nice fishes and they were quite colourful, however it was not as good as we had expected it to be. After talking to a few people the belief is that the reef will be dead in 30-40 years and some say it is already dead compared to what it used to be like. We have been snorkelling before and found Egypts coral in January to be far brighter and alive with different types of fish. Don't get me wrong it was still good to be out in the sea swimming with all the fish but I think we were expecting this to be a Paradise just because it was the Great Barrier Reef. We managed to spend a couple of hours swimming about before it was time to move onto the next dive site.

At the next site the tide was really low and this meant that the space we had to move around was limited due to some of the rocks not being submerged by the water. In addition if you tried to go and swim in certain areas you were whistled at and told to come back near the boat as if you were in a swimming pool. The boat we were on had around 100 people on it and therefore when there are so many people in the one bit of sea it became a bit crowded. None the less, we still seen a lot of nice fishes again and we enjoyed the experience of being out in the middle of the sea.

It was then time for us to go on our introductury dive. This was to be a 20-30 minute scuba dive with an instructor. I'm not sure if it was the company or the instructor who was too safety conscious as here we all had to link arms and have him pull us along so we weren't allowed to actually swim. At one point he had me and another guy on each arm and put Gemma underneath him and it was as if he was dragging her along the floor! Again it was good to experience diving but we have the feeling that it could have been better than what it was if we had a different instructor. By the sounds of it Ian and Amy were luckier as they were landed with the same instructor but they managed to see a turtle swim past them, and later on Amy seen a reef shark. They hired out an underwater camera and if we manage to steal any pics off of them we will post them up for you.