Robert's Travels

Our final day on the Great Barrier Reef, like many of our days on this trip, began early. Our first dive, on Flynn reef at a dive site named Little Tracy, was a dawn dive. We woke up at 5:45, had our dive briefing at 6:00, and after getting suited up and completing our buddy checks jumped into the water right at 6:30. The sun was starting to rise as we began descending. The dive site was adjacent to the Gordon’s mooring dive from yesterday; we swam from the anchor to a bommie named Little Tracy that we circled. The dive plan was pretty straightforward, but it gave us some pretty neat views. As we were swimming from the anchor to Little Tracy we encountered a small coral outcropping that had close to thirty large bumphead parrotfish that were just sitting there, chilling in a tight group. It was a fantastic thing to see as we started the day. Once we reached Little Tracy we swam clockwise around the coral, encountering several razorfish, a few moorish idols, and some surf parrotfish. There were obviously many other fish we saw; those were just the ones I could identify. We completed the loop of Little Tracy with about 90 bar remaining; we swam back to the gates from the previous day’s dive and did our safety stop on top of the gates. We didn’t see any turtles, though once we were back on the boat we heard several people say they saw a turtle around the gates.

We had a quick breakfast after taking off our gear, with lots of bacon, toast, fruit salad and yogourt. There was a bit of time to kill after breakfast as the boat moved to our final dive site, so I used the time to do a bit of light packing and a bit of journaling. The boat arrived at our final dive site, Tracy’s (not to be confused with Little Tracy) on Flynn reef shortly after 8:30, just in time for the dive briefing. This dive was another easy one - we swam out from the anchor blocks to Tracy’s bommie, then traced the shelf south to the tip of the reef. We saw a cluster of anemones, but unfortunately there were no clownfish that wanted to show themselves so we didn’t get to find Nemo on this dive. This was the first dive that I took a camera on, and I took the opportunity to snap some underwater photos using my FauxPro. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be a super high quality camera - after descending past about 10 m it got wonky and would keep shutting off. It had no problems above 10 m however, so I’m guessing it was just a quality control issue. The dive was nice, the views were good, and there were lots of fish to see.

We returned from our second dive shortly before 10:00, and because the next briefing was scheduled for 10:30 we didn’t do anything but go up to the second story of the boat and wait for everyone to arrive. The briefing for the final dive was pretty straightforward; we were going to be turning left instead of right after reaching the anchor blocks and then playing in the bommies until we ran out of air. We geared up, did our checks, and then jumped in the water at about 10:45 for our final dive of the trip. This was a fun dive - we swam along the ocean floor until we reached a sandy slope nicknamed the ‘Ski Slope’, then turned back and weaved in between the bommies around the reef. This actually ended up being our longest dive time; since the bommies were in reasonably shallow water we didn’t go through air as quickly and were able to stay down for almost 40 minutes. We saw some barracudas while we were swimming out to the ski slope, as well as some unicorn fish in the reef, several variants of the butterfly fish, and some other gigantic fish whose name we couldn’t determine. We were out of the water just before 11:30, and then took apart our gear, rinsed everything off, and took our equipment up to the top deck to dry.

We went inside the cabin, had a light lunch of cold cuts, salads and dessert, then did some more packing. Everyone was onboard just before noon, and the boat started heading back to shore at around 12:15. We showered and got everything squared away while the boat was heading back - the ocean was much calmer than on our outbound voyage so there were no issues with us moving about the cabin. The trip back took about three hours, and we were on dry land again by 15:30. We headed back to the dive shop to check in, get our log books stamped, and then got into a minivan with some other divers to be dropped off at our AirBnB. We got to the AirBnB just after 16:00, and there were no issues signing in. We unpacked our dive gear and got it soaking in the tub, just to remove any salt from the past few days, and got a load of laundry going. We had each brought a pair of towels onto the boat; one for drying off after diving, and another for drying off after showering at the end of the day. Neither truly dried out during the time on the boat, so we used the laundry facilities at the AirBnB to get these towels clean again.

After getting these chores out of the way we played cards for a bit, then headed to dinner at around 17:45. We chose a restaurant named Linga Longa, which was a short walk from the AirBnB. We got to the restaurant and saw there were no other diners, which was a bit of a concern. We decided to give it a chance as the reviews on Google were positive, and we figured we may have just been early. We were both very happy that we gave it a chance, as the cocktails were delicious and the food was fantastic. Todd had a duck a l’orange, which is apparently the house specialty, while I had their special, a beef bourguignon. Both dishes were tasty and fresh. After dinner we came back to the AirBnB and attempted to watch the reunion episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, unfortunately about ten minutes into the episode the stream started buffering heavily and we couldn’t finish watching. That was alright, however, as we were both pretty tired. A short while later we both headed to bed.