This was more like what I expected from the Great Barrier Reef! Our first dive at Osprey Reef was Admiralty Anchorage; one big bommie surrounded by little deeper ones. We dropped down into the sand and almost landed on a white-tipped reef shark. There were lionfish, lots more anemonefish-packed anemones, and a cool swimthrough in the main bommie.

I really fell in love with the little fish, though. We hung out at the top of the main bommie for a while, where there were schools of anthias swarming around over the reef. I especially loved these little purple anthias with their pointy noses:

Our second and third dives of the day were a little further north at False Entry, where the tender boats dropped us off a good ways from the boat, along a wall. This was our first tender entry of the trip (backrolls!) and we didn’t do so well. My snorkel – which I’ve had since I first got certified, and which we were required to have with us in Australia – immediately popped off and disappeared into the thousands of feet of water below us. Jeff made it through the backroll intact, but then lost a weight pocket while putting away his camera lens cover.

Luckily, neither one of those was a dive-stopper! We moseyed over to the wall and enjoyed the long swim back to the boat. As we approached the sandy area beneath the SpoilSport, we could see white-tipped reef sharks hanging out in 60 feet of water, and we noted their location for the next dive.

The second dive, just in the sandy patches and bommies under the boat, was even more fun than the first. Besides getting close to several whitetips being cleaned, we discovered two “families” of fire dartfish. In Hawaii, these guys are really a special find, so I was bouncing off the walls when Jeff first spotted one here. He even had the right lens on! Then we noticed another… and another… a whole family group of fire dartfish, all different sizes!

Turns out they’re a little more common in the GBR. Oh well – they’re still cool.

After another dive up north, we headed back to Admiralty Anchorage for the night dive, then crashed in exhaustion. Sunday was going to be a big day, with a shark feeding dive in the afternoon!

It didn’t start out so auspiciously. Our first dive Sunday morning was just kind of an okay site, nothing special. When we surfaced, the boat was eerily quiet. All the lights were off, the compressors weren’t compressing, and there was no air conditioning or water in the rooms.

Gack.

The party line was that a generator overloaded, but the version I heard from a crewmember later was a bit more annoying. Some unnamed diver had “plugged in” their device without using a real plug – just bare wires stuck into either side of the outlet. This setup created a huge power drain on the first generator, and when it finally gave up all that drain killed the second generator as well!

It took several hours for the engineer to get us back up and running, during which most of us repaired to the top deck to stay out of the muggy interior of the boat.

When we finally got moving, the plan had changed – we’d do the shark dive before lunch instead of in the afternoon. Apparently the tuna heads for the shark feed were starting to spoil because of the power issue, and I think they also wanted to hurry up and get the big dive in before anything else went wrong…

After our first day in Sydney, we both kind of felt like we were done already: we were ready to get on the dive boat. But then we spent Sydney Day Two being shown all around the area on a bus… and we started to wish we had longer to explore! So it was a little bit sad to hop in a cab Wednesday morning and head to the airport, even though we were psyched about getting on with the diving portion of the trip.

The Sydney domestic terminal was a little bit trippy for two reasons. First, instead of a combined check-in where you get your boarding pass and leave your bags, it was two separate areas: check-in and “Luggage Drop.” They accepted our insanely heavy pile of backs without even flinching, and we breezed on through security – which is when we realized trippy thing #2. They never checked our IDs! Not at check-in, not at security, and not when you board. Quite a change from flying around the US.

We landed in Cairns to heat, humidity, and a steady drizzle from cloudy skies. The hotel we’d picked based on recommendations from other divers turned out to be a little crummier than expected – and there was NO ELEVATOR. We were only on the second floor, but hauling all our crapola up an outdoor staircase in the rain and humidity was not the best introduction to the facility. The room itself was stuffy and ant-infested, with a comforter that clearly had not been washed in years (as I discovered when I lay down on it – first I thought maybe I smelled that bad, but we quickly ascertained that the year-old-sweat smell was not coming from me).

We headed out to spend an evening exploring what Cairns had to offer. Turns out, an evening is plenty of time to check out the Esplanade and the Pier, with all the little tourist shops and restaurants. We also passed a lovely-looking Holiday Inn, and decided on the spot to change our reservations for the following week to that lovely, elevator-having hotel.

There was one very cool thing about Cairns at night: as soon as the sun sets, the bats come out. And I’m not talking about wussy little American bats: these are “flying foxes,” enormous fruit bats that squawk their way into the night.

We got a better look at the bats Thursday morning, on our way back to the hotel room after breakfast. Passing under some enormous trees, we suddenly realized the noises we were hearing were bat sounds – and the trees overhead were full of them:

We checked out of the “hotel,” dropped our bags off at the Mike Ball office… and then had about seven hours to kill until dinner and boarding the boat. And we’d already explored the Esplanade the night before. Doh. After wasting some time photographing the bats, we crashed for a few hours at a big backpacker’s resort – with a pool. And a bar.

Once we were sunburned enough, it was back to the Esplanade and Pier. We killed another hour just lounging around in a park; I snoozed on a bench in the shade while Jeff snapped macro photos of green-assed ants (yes, that is the scientific name).

Somehow, we passed the time until dinner, when we met up with the rest of the folks who’d signed up through California Digital Diving. And then – at last – it was time to board the boat! Everyone was exhausted and cranky from a day spent walking in circles around Cairns, so it was kind of funny as we were all herded onto the boat and they tried to get everyone’s picture. Sweaty, grumpy people – so photogenic.

It felt great to finally curl up in our bunks. I’m not sure what was more exciting: knowing that we’d spend the night steaming out to the Great Barrier Reef, or knowing that we wouldn’t have to pick up our damned luggage again for a week. Woohoo!

We woke up Saturday morning at Challenger Bay, at the end of one of the northern Ribbon Reefs. Everyone seemed to be bundling up in 3 or 5 mil wetsuits; so much so that I started to worry about our measly 1mils. But as soon as we dropped into the 84 degree water, I quit worrying – bathwater, baby!

Our first impression of the Great Barrier Reef was actually a little disappointing. Thanks to a lot of recent rain and wind chop, the vis was only about 40′ – not any better than it’s been in Southern California the last year. And Challenger Bay, while pretty, didn’t exactly blow our minds like we’d expected.

But hey – we finally got to see giant clams! And anemonefish!

After two dives at Challenger Bay, we motored up to Cod Hole, home of enormous potato cod. I was unimpressed by one diver who insisted on grabbing at the fish – although, it did make for some cool photo ops:

The vis still wasn’t great, but getting to see these enormous fish tooling around pretty much made up for it. Jeff saw one pounce on a fish and snap it up with an audible gulp.

We stayed at Cod Hole for the first night dive of the trip – and again, I have to say I was a little underwhelmed. The night dives we’ve done in the Caribbean and Hawaii have always been so full of action, and packed with different critters. At Cod Hole, we saw another potato cod… a few jacks trying to hunt by our lights… and some fusiliers hiding under coral ledges. If you looked really close, you could also find some interesting little crabs and shrimps. But – eh.

Luckily, the next morning we woke up at Osprey Reef, another 70 km northeast of the Ribbon Reefs. There we had perfect weather, calm seas, and incredible vis….

It turns out that a 14-hour flight with Qantas is a lot like wasting an entire day lying around on your couch watching movies. Except that an airplane seat isn’t nearly as comfortable as your couch.

Two movies, two meals, many snacks, and six episodes of Buffy (watched on our laptops) later, we arrived in Sydney shortly before midnight on Sunday. After collecting our gazillion pounds of luggage and waiting in several different lines, we emerged into a Sydney summer night: humid, but cool and breezy. We managed to flag down a cab with enough trunk space for all our dive and camera gear, and headed towards our hotel.

We were both immediately struck by all the large, expensive-looking billboards. For some reason, I imagined Australia (even Sydney) would be LESS commercial than the US. But the density and size of these things dwarfed any signage in Los Angeles; all the sleek billboards lining the sharp curves in the road actually reminded us of playing the game Grand Theft Auto.

Driving on the left side of the road wasn’t too weird – but having the driver be on the right side of the car WAS. Go figure.

After a (fairly) good night’s sleep at the Darling Harbour Holiday Inn, we nabbed a city map from the concierge and headed out to explore the area. Our first stop was a 20 minute walk northeast to Sydney Tower, in hopes of getting some pretty aerial views of the city. $15 buys you the right to stand inside a glassed-in observatory and look at the city. It was very pretty. Kind of hard to photograph in the stark morning light, though. We got bored quickly, and headed on towards the opera house.

We killed time waiting for the next Opera House tour by wandering around outside, photographing the House and some random birds (ibis) in the nearby park. You know, trying to get as sweaty and smelly as possible. (Did I mention the cloudless sky and 90 degree temperatures? Thank goodness for the breeze.)

The Opera House was pretty impressive, both inside and out, but the only real highlight of the tour for me was stepping inside the main concert hall to watch the Sydney Symphony practicing for a few minutes. The acoustics really were something else in there.

We opted to cross the harbor and check out Taronga Zoo for the afternoon. The ferry terminal is just a short walk from the Opera House, and then it was just a 10 minute ride across to Taronga’s little aerial cable cars that zip you up to the top of the zoo.

Of course our first stop, once we learned of it, had to be at the giraffe enclosure to get a picture of us feeding carrots to the creatures. Jeff was alarmingly uninterested in feeding giraffes, but videotaped me getting slobbered on and then joined me for a very un-flattering (if accurate) posed photo.

After that, we mostly wandered around aimlessly. We caught part of a seal show, which included quite a performance by a California sea lion. It was nice to see one of our “buddies” up there, but a little sad to see him doing such undignified things as balancing a ball on his nose. (Also, the trainer referred to him constantly as a “seal”, which is a big enough pet peeve of mine that my head just about exploded).

Across from the show was a series of tanks for the zoo’s seals and sea lions, which housed an enormous leopard seal. You know, the ones that cruise around Antarctica eating penguins? It was a beautiful creature, although I was disappointed we didn’t get a look at its gaping jaws.

The two saltwater crocodiles did put on a bit of a show. One was in the back of the enclosure, perfectly still but with its mouth wide open. The other was crammed up against the glass at the very front of the enclosure, where you could get within an inch of it (or however thick the glass is). He was snoozing in the sun with his eyes closed – mostly. Jeff got a bit of a scare when he looked up from taking a picture into a pair of now-wide-open crocodile eyes.

After all the walking we did on Monday, we decided to make Tuesday more of a sitting-around kind of day. We found a pair of hop-on/hop-off bus services, Sydney and Bondi Explorers, that make loops through the city and outlying beaches. We boarded right across the street from our hotel, and made a loop through the western part of the city before switching over to the Bondi Explorer to go find some beaches to lie around on.

The traffic in the city was pretty nightmarish, and we soon discovered why: the Queen Mary 2 was docked in Sydney for a couple of days, and would be joined tonight by the QE2. Apparently it was quite an event, and besides all the cruise ship tourists flooding the city, plenty of locals were driving in to check out the boats. I have to admit, the Queen Mary was impressive – the darn thing just goes up and up and UP.

We hopped off the bus at the stop we figured was closest to Shark Bay in Nielsen Park, and quickly discovered that it wasn’t, really. After a bit of a hot, sweaty hike through an upscale residential district (covered with enormous spiderwebs and matching spiders), we finally found the entrance to Nielsen Park, at least. We just kept following whatever road we were on, until at last we discovered what apparently only USED to be called Shark Bay. It’s a pretty little cove with cliffs at either end, shark nets to keep swimmers from getting munched, a lovely view of the harbor, and no surf to speak of. And, thank goodness, a shop that sold water. We were pretty dried out by this point.

I went for a quick swim, and then we decided to go find the next “hop-on” point for the bus. With a little help from various locals, we managed to find it after only a 10 minute walk. Guess we should have gotten OFF at that one.

I was just starting to feel cool and hydrated again when we hit our next stop: Bondi Beach. We nabbed lunch on the boardwalk, and then headed over to work on our tans and bodysurfing. The waves were just big enough to be fun without being too scary; the water, though shockingly cold at first, was comfortable once you started leaping and ducking under and over the waves! And if you got cold, it didn’t take long to warm up again lying out on the hot sand.

Several hours and a good case of sunburn later, we caught the bus again back into town. We didn’t want to spend another hour and a half on the Sydney Explorer part of the loop, even though it would drop us off back at the hotel, so instead we jumped off at the Bondi Explorer stop that was closest to our hotel – still a 20 minute walk, a little more since my sweaty, rubbing-together thighs were totally killing me by this time! Always reason #1 on my list for losing weight…

Our tour bus driver had mentioned that there would be fireworks that night over the opera house, to celebrate the two cruise ships being in town together, so we decided to brave the crowds and head back into Circular Quay for dinner. We found a restaurant close to the harbor bridge that was only MOSTLY booked, but still had room for us. Our leisurely (and delicious) dinner was broken up by occasional trips outside to watch and photograph the arrival of the Queen Elizabeth 2 into Circular Quay, with an escort of fire boats (spraying water), police boats, and about a dozen helicopters. We polished off dessert and paid our bill just in time to join the crowd outside to watch fireworks.

I’m not normally a big fireworks person, but I have to say: soundtrack-free Sydney fireworks over the Opera House are something else. The fireworks themselves were impressive and diverse, but I think the backdrop was a big part of the experience. It was only a five or ten minute show, but I enjoyed it more than any fireworks I’ve seen – and Jeff even got pictures!

We sneaked out the backside of the quay and up a hill back into the Rocks district in hopes of catching a cab away from all the crowds, and – luckily for my poor legs – succeeded. And so ended our Sydney visit – the next morning we were off to Cairns for the diving portion of the trip!

Sorry for the lack of Australia-related posts.  We’ve been home since Sunday, but between catching up on sleep, laundry, work, and dealing with jet-lag, I haven’t really gotten around to putting together a trip report yet.

Jeff’s churning through tons of pictures, topside and underwater, so at the very least I should be able to link to that soon.  Blog posts might have to wait a few more days; I need to import all the video I took before I return the borrowed hi-def camera later this week, so that’ll be eating up my non-work hours for a little bit.

But stay tuned. :)

Some things we will be up to in the next two weeks:

• Spending the most consecutive hours on a plane in our lives to date
• Liveaboard diving in the Great Barrier Reef off Mike Ball’s Spoilsport
• Attempting to drive on the left side of the road
• Riding a hot air balloon over north Queensland
• Rainforest hikes in the Daintree Forest (including a nighttime croc-spotting walk)
• Lounging at Sydney beaches
• Carting around far too much luggage for a measly two people
• Not getting killed by box jellies, cone snails, blue-ring octopi, sea snakes, or sting rays

Wish us luck! I’ll save up the blog entries for my return, as we don’t expect to bother with the internet on this trip.

I kept meaning to write a post about Christmas jewelry, both given and received, but I’ve been putting it off for two months now. Jeff recently reminded me that he took this gorgeous photo of the necklace I made for Mom, and am I going to post it anytime soon? So here it is:

The cowry shell is one I found diving at Old Marineland last September, and I threaded the bead strings and braided them myself. This is about as craft-y as I’ve ever bothered to get, but I was pretty pleased with the result. I made a nearly-identical one for Katie, with a second shell I found in October.

Now I’ve got to go find one for me…

Last Sunday, we took the Great Escape out to Santa Barbara Island. We boarded the night before, sharing a stateroom with our buddy Bonnie – which made for a “slumber party” atmosphere (poor Jeff). The boat left the dock around 1am, and we slept sort of fitfully as we made our way across the swells.

Half the time when you sign up to go to SBI, you wake up at Catalina because the conditions were too rough to make it. So I was both excited and annoyed when the divemasters pounded on our stateroom door at 6:30am yelling that we had 30 minutes to get in the water. Yay, we’re at Santa Barbara… but 30 minutes? Rushing into the water? Barely awake divers? That could definitely be a recipe for disaster.

The boat being only half-full (Suberbowl Sunday kept a lot of folks away) meant there was plenty of room on the dive deck, which made the rush to get wet a bit easier. Groups of sea lions frolicking around the boat helped speed us on, too! Our threesome plopped into the water by 7am, and we dropped down to a sandy area between ridges to wait and see who would show up to play. I was borrowing Lars’s hi-def camera again, this time with his Ikelite housing so I had full access to all controls, and a removable red filter.

I was quite happy to be doing a dive that basically entailed sitting still and letting things come to you, since the new camera was plenty of task loading already. Diving in a threesome is hard enough; diving in a threesome and covering ground makes for lots of lost buddy situations.

The visibility was amazing, and the heavy sand out at Santa Barbara Island meant that even if you (or the sea lions) kicked it up a bit, it settled quickly without mucking up the vis. I’ve never seen such a good combination of cooperative pinnipeds and clear water. Everyone had a good enough time at the first dive site that we stayed put for dive #2, dropping back in the water around 9am.

For dive #2, we camped out in the sand next to the edge of the kelp forest, and watched sea lions scare away schools of senorita. But out in the sand was where the sea lions really liked to play, both with each other and with us. We wound up forming a wide circle with each other, everyone getting photos of sea lions pestering everyone else.

This dive was also when we saw the largest number of juveniles. There is just nothing cuter than a baby sea lion, with their big puppy eyes and enormous whiskers.

When we surfaced, we realized we’d drifted a bit with the current. Normally, surface swims pretty much suck – but they’re a lot more fun when you have an escort of sea lions the whole way back!

We moved over to another site for our last dive of the day, but the sea lions still didn’t desert us. This was my 300th dive, as shown in my previous post, and a pretty pleasant way to spend it. Although I did have an embarrassing incident where my fin strap came undone – and at my current weight, my drysuit is so tight at the hips that I can’t bend over properly to put it back on! Jeff had to do it for me.

Everyone was out of the water by noon, and the boat started back to shore while the cook served lunch. I talked to some friends the next day who were supposed to go out to SBI on another boat, but bailed when they learned the plan was to just cram in 3 dives at one site for nothing but sea lions. It’s true that sometimes that can really suck – if the vis is poor, or the sea lions don’t show, those sites can be mighty boring. But we really had a great time, even just doing 3 almost-identical dives.

How can you not have fun with these guys?

More pics at the Santa Barbara gallery – and I’ll put together a video soon!

Haven’t gotten around to writing a full-on dive report about the sea lions on Sunday, but I love this photo that Bonnie nabbed of me on my 300th dive:

Carol asks why I stopped hosting the website myself – seems like a good topic for a blog entry. :)

I originally ran the server from home for two main reasons: I wanted full control over installations and server issues, and I needed more space than hosting companies at the time could affordably provide. The main downside when I first started up the server was that the download speeds could be very slow, since we had a pretty slow Earthlink connection. We shelled out for some extra speed with a different DSL provider (Speakeasy), and basically wound up paying an extra $40 a month for the privilege of hosting our own server.

I enjoyed it though – no need to wait for user support if I needed something fixed, I got to practice lots of sysadmin stuff, and I was able to configure everything exactly how I wanted to.

Recently, though, it’s been getting a little slow. Even with the “fast” uplink that we pay for, once you get a few users looking at photos or downloading movies the connection gets eaten up pretty quickly. So I started looking around at hosting companies again.

And, lo and behold, they’ve come a long way in 3 years. I can now get 200 GB of room for only $10 a month, and – the best part – I have shell access to my account, so I can log in and futz around with stuff on the command line. I can install my own software, manage my own databases, and even make most (possibly all) of the configuration changes I’d ever need to things like the web server, mail server, etc. It’s all done through web-based control panels which wrap my changes in all kinds of levels of security, but it works. So far I have yet to find anything I can’t do with my Dreamhost account that I could with my own server.

And what’s been even more surprising is their great response to user tickets. So far I’ve had exactly two problems: one required an actual configuration fix at their end, the other was just something I didn’t know how to do. In both cases I heard back within an hour with a fix.

So – faster, cheaper, still plenty flexible, tons of disk space… I have yet to encounter a downside. But I’ll let you know if one ever rears its head. If all goes well in the next month or two, we’ll be able to shut off our noisy server in the office and stop paying the extra cash to Speakeasy every month. That seems worth the day or two of hassle involved moving over all my databases and files.

So far, so good in my migration to DreamHost.   An actual post will be coming later about sea lions now that I’ve got my blog in its new home!