Sharknado

Day five of our liveaboard trip took us out into the Coral Sea to a remote volcanic pinnacle named Osprey Reef. The dropoffs at the edge of the reef go down 1000 meters, so this is a good spot for oceanic critters and sharks. LOTS of sharks.

Our first dive of the day was the first drift dive on this liveaboard; for the non-divers, a drift dive is where you get dropped off in one spot, drift with the current, and get picked up elsewhere. The Blue Marlin Wall dive site is so named because it’s a steep wall (that’s the obvious bit), and we’re not sure about the “Marlin” part since they never mentioned anything about possibly seeing one. With dropoffs below us extending thousands of feet we floated along, alternately observing the reef wall and then checking out the deep blue background as tuna and sharks materialized into view, swam past, then disappeared again into the background.

The second dive of the day was called “Sharknado”, so named because they do a “shark attraction” that involves tuna heads in a cage being lowered into the dive site, resulting in all of the local sharks coming in to check it out. My favorite bit of this dive was actually the entry, where we jumped into a school of maybe twenty sharks and slowly descended towards the reef. The sharks obviously didn’t care about the divers in their midst, and it was my first time swimming through a school of sharks, so it was almost certainly my favorite descent to a dive site of all time.

I skipped the day’s third dive to recover a bit (have I mentioned that they dive a LOT on this boat?), then did the fourth dive later in the day in super clear water where swimming over deep chasms in the reef felt exactly like flying through the air – I may or may not have Superman’d over a few spots. We’ve got two more days of diving, after which twenty-five percent of the (approximately) one hundred dives I’ve done in my lifetime will have been on this one boat.