I think we missed the 50 Year storm at Bells Beach and found it in Cairns. We arrived to a wet Cairns that was being hit by the tail end of a tropical storm, you forget the size of Australia sometimes, geographically we were in the tropics and it was humid as hell. For two days it rained pretty much consistently, so we spent the time doing a refresher dive and also studying the course book for our advanced open water which we were due to take on the reef.
It is actually cyclone season right now around the Reef and Queensland so when it was still raining and stormy on day two in Cairns we were a little concerned that our trip would get called off. Trust me we didn't want to have another 3 days to hang around Cairns beacause we might have gone crazy! Thankfully at the end of day two the rain stopped and just before the sun went for the day a blue sky was seen and we had new hope for the morning.
So the next morning, we set off early with the sun shining upon us for the Great Barrier Reef. We arrived at our Live-aboard dive boat Scubapro II, our home for the next 3 days. We knew visibility was not going to be the best and we had some swell left over from the storm to make the journey out interesting but by the time we got to our first dive site the weather reports had things calming down and improving dramatically over our three days. This was great news, as feedback from the last trip that was out there was that life was not pretty during the storm!!
Steph and I have good sea legs, but we still took some sea sickness preventatives to help for the 3.5 boat journey, some however thought they knew better….lets just say we had maybe 1ft of swell but these folks did not see much outside of the sickbag or back of the boat!
We arrived at the first dive site; we got suited in our ever so sexy stinger suits and dived right in! It was heavenly, refreshment from the humidity we had endured in Cairns, and fantastic to be going back into the underworld of the Great Barrier Reef.
