Ryan's Journal

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.

Today is the day where everyone doing the three day trip departs and those doing the four day trip embark, so after a 6:30 wakeup and a walk on Lizard Island we only had three dives on the schedule. Under any other circumstances three dives in one day would seem like a lot, but compared to the past two days (and the next three), today felt downright leisurely. Also – and it hurts my soul to write this – I was extremely glad for a bit of downtime to catch my breath.

All but three other passengers left at Lizard Island and a new group joined, but we’ve gone from 24 people on the boat to just 12, so there’s more room at meals and the dive deck has gone from crowded to feeling like we’ve got our own private dressing rooms. Our first two dives today were good ones, with minimal current, tons of pretty coral, and lots of neat marine life ranging from large groupers to big barracuda to teeny pipefish. We spent a ton of time in the shallows on the second dive, with amazingly colorful corals, pretty starfish, innumerable reef fish, and a billion other things that I’m not capable of identifying. During our return to the boat Audrey also found the world’s friendliest batfish; the two foot long fish hung out with her while we did a safety stop (photo below).

We had high hopes for this evening’s night dive since the one two days ago was so great, but Audrey’s light died pretty early into the dive – it turns out that diving at night is less fun when you can’t see – so we shared my light and I served as her seeing-eye buddy for the dive. It was still neat having so many fish around, but it’s not quite as easy to relax on a dive when you’re also trying to make sure that your partner of nineteen wonderful years doesn’t accidentally swim headfirst into the reef.

Tonight we’re expecting a somewhat rough crossing from the Great Barrier Reef into the Coral Sea, then if we’re lucky and conditions are good, tomorrow should be an action-packed day of diving in a pretty special place.

After five dives yesterday I was wiped out, and today’s first dive was at a narrow pinnacle with a reasonably strong current where you’d swim half a lap into the current, then half a lap getting pushed. When we came out of the water both Audrey and I needed a breather and so we decided to skip the second dive, which was at the same site. Luckily during the break between dives two minke whales came in to check out the boat, so I hopped in for an easy snorkel with the whales, who were playing coy but still came in close enough to cause a bit of spine tingle whenever they appeared from the blue – seeing a small whale slowly materialize as it swims towards you is a pretty awesome experience.

Our second dive of the day was at Cod Hole, famous for its human-sized and very friendly Potato Cod. This dive site had a significant current when we got there, so we jumped in, used a rope to get to the mooring line, used the mooring line to get to the bottom, then sat on the sand while our onboard reef monitor handed out snacks to one of the giant fishies. The potato cod are apparently able to respond to hand signals after several years of human interaction, and this one waited like a dog for its treats before sucking them down in giant gulps.

Our last dive of the day was along a coral wall, after which we came back to the boat and conked out for thirty minutes, then had our final dinner with many of the passengers who will be departing tomorrow, including (as we learned tonight) a teeny Columbian girl who is apparently an undefeated chili-eating champion; her proud mother told us “she doesn’t feel the spice, and has won $2000 so far, beating all of the big men!”

The second half of the dive trip is out in the Coral Sea, and visits several remote reefs that are extinct volcanoes that rise thousands of feet straight up from the ocean floor. We’re going from 24 passengers to just 12, so it should be a much cozier group. After last night’s shark madness Audrey showed Pedro (one of the staff divers) a video, and his response was “that’s nothing compared to what’s coming”. We’re tired and may need to skip a dive or two going forward if we’re going to make it through this trip (that kills me to admit), but we’re super excited to see what else is out there.

This week of diving is going to be BUSY. We did two dives after boarding on the first day, then FIVE dives today, including a night dive with what seemed like every shark in Australia swimming around, past, and alongside us. After the first dive I was worried it could be a horrific trip, after the last dive I’m pretty sure it will be one of the best dive trips we ever do.

The trip started ominously with a checkout dive in choppy waters where there was all sorts of confusion about what to do, what the hand signals were, etc. Before I even got to the bottom I’d blown through a quarter of my air, and Audrey and I both came up questioning what we’d gotten ourselves into. Since then, however, it has been amazing. The coral is generally really healthy, the fish are fearless, and there’s tons of neat stuff to see.

While yesterday’s two dives were on the inner reef, the boat motored through the night, and now we’re diving the outer, less visited portion of the reef, specifically Ribbon Reef #9. The first four dives today were good ones – we saw a few cuttlefish on the day’s first dive at 7am, and I need to see more since they are awesome. All sorts of other fish have made appearances, but between my utter inability to identify fish and the fact that it would bore everyone reading this journal for me to do so, I’ll just move on to the night dive with a bazillion sharks.

We did two dives at the same spot today, one in the late afternoon, and one after dark, and the difference in the dive site was the epitome of “night and day”. Before we even jumped in the water for our night dive we could see tons of sharks, trevally, and other big fish out hunting, and when we got in the water it was an instant madhouse. We were utterly surrounded by big fish, with three foot trevally and six foot sharks gliding past just inches away. They didn’t care one bit for us, and were totally focused on getting their meal on, sometimes pushing themselves under ledges to wrestle out poor souls they’d found. After forty-five minutes of swimming through hordes of the beasts we returned to the boat, and I’m pretty sure that dive is now safely in my top three dives ever (mantas are hard to beat).

Tomorrow there are only four dives on the schedule, then we have an in-between day with just a couple of dives while some of the passengers and crew rotate out at Lizard Island, then we’ll have three more very full days of diving out in the Coral Sea. The photos for the next few days will all be screen captures from GoPro video, so the quality won’t be quite up to the standards of the big Canon camera, but they should give some sense of what we’re seeing.

A lot of the time Australia feels very similar to home, but then something happens to remind you that you’re in a whole different world. This morning we joined two other Americans on the lodge’s outdoor deck for breakfast when I noticed an eight-foot long python climbing a tree just behind our table. One of the servers was on her way out with coffees, focusing intently on trying not to spill anything, and when she looked up to see that she was eye to eye with a very large snake her tray nearly tipped, she did an immediate one-eighty, and I’m not sure whether the coffees ever got delivered. In a similar vein, this evening we’re staying in a big hotel in downtown Cairns, and just after dark I waded out into the sea of humanity looking for an ATM, withdrew my money, and heard a noisy flock of birds in a tree in the median. While looking closer to try to identify them, a massive fruit bat flew over my head, and I quickly realized I wasn’t hearing birds. Australia isn’t totally dissimilar to home, but when it’s different, it’s very different.

In addition to the adventures above, our day started early with a 7am ride to look for crocodiles with the Daintree Boatman – you’d have to be a crazy insane person to spend six weeks in Australia and NOT devote at least one morning to driving around in a tiny boat looking for 17-foot man-eating reptiles, right? The weather was foreboding, and we eventually got rained on, but we did manage to spot a ton of neat birds, a tree full of giant fruit bats, and eventually a couple of crocs made appearances as well. Following the boat ride we said goodbye to the friendly staff, spiders, snakes, lizards and frogs at the lodge, and headed down to Mossman Gorge for one last hike through the rainforest. Aside from some wild pigs the animals in that part of the rainforest were hiding from us, but it was good to get one last walk among all of the strangler figs, vines, and other jungle residents.

Tonight we’re in Cairns in preparation for boarding a boat in the morning for a week out on the Great Barrier Reef, a place that has been on both of our bucket lists for many, many years. There may be intermittent internet access while out on the reef, but if the journal doesn’t get updated for a few days please wait a bit, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve met an early demise, and I’ll still try to write daily entries even if there’s a delay before they get uploaded.

We spent the entire morning today roaming around the rainforest at our lodge looking at all sorts of critters. At breakfast we shared our table with a tree frog who was sleeping while sticking to the table leg. Afterwards the staff pointed out a two-foot long Boyd’s forest dragon who was hanging out on a tree, and tons of other weird birds and bugs were out and about – there are ants with bright green butts and caterpillars that stick out red devil horns when you disturb them! Coming to the rainforest for two nights was definitely a good call.

The staff here seems excited that we like the wildlife so much, and have been coming to find us whenever something new shows up; after a guided walk in the morning we were getting ready to leave the resort when Sarah knocked on our door to let us know that a tree snake was hunting frogs in the pond. After more photos of the snake, as well as a bush turkey who wandered by, we finally jumped in the car for a drive up to Cape Tribulation to look for cassowaries.

The route to Cape Tribulation started with a ferry ride over the croc-infested river, and was followed by a drive along a road that was still in the process of being rebuilt after several sections had apparently washed away. One of the warnings from the park service about the huge, dinosaur-like cassowaries was to “be cass-o-wary” (they aren’t the friendliest animals), but when we finally spotted one he was alongside the road and not too interested in the humans that were watching him from the car. Sadly there was no good place to pull over so I didn’t get any photos, but Audrey managed to grab some video of the encounter so that we’ll still be able to remember it in our senile years.

Early tomorrow morning we’re off on the river to spot crocodiles, then we’ll give the cassowaries one more try on the way back to Cairns, where we’re spending the night prior to boarding our scuba liveaboard on Thursday.

This morning we flew from Uluru to Cairns, so in the span of four days we’ve traveled over two thousand miles from Australia’s southwestern coast through its center to the northeastern coast. Cairns is where our weeklong Great Barrier Reef diving trip starts in three days, but until then we’re spending a couple of nights further north in a rainforest that is around 180 million years old, making it one of the oldest rainforests on Earth.

After checking in to our ecolodge and giving Audrey time to photograph the very large spiders outside of our room, we ate dinner next to a small pond with several of the world’s largest tree frogs hanging out on leaves nearby. There were also some distressingly active spiders ensuring that the mosquito population was kept in check, as well as the biggest moth I’ve ever seen watching over the entire scene. Audrey has been in her happy place since we arrived, but while I’m a big fan of the frogs, I’m going to need a bit more practice before I’m totally OK with having golfball-sized spiders bungeeing in throughout dinner.

Our plan for tomorrow is to go for a drive to look for cassowaries and whatever else pops out of the rainforest, and in two days we’re planning on an early morning river trip to spot giant crocodiles (as one does). Somehow I’m down to the last two weeks of this long sabbatical, but that two weeks is going to be filled with plenty more epic adventures.

Our visit to Uluru has been a very good one so far, except for the flies. The flies are evil and should die, even though they are just doing what flies do. We have headnets to (mostly) mitigate the hordes that follow us around incessantly and crawl on everything and make us insane and I’ll stop writing about them now and get back to the good parts of Uluru even though I hate the flies oh I hate them so much.

The bus ride from Alice Springs two days ago was a neat way to see the scenery, although it did get a bit pungent over the last two hours after a passenger spent a while checking out the “emergency use only” facilities at the back of the bus. Noxious odors aside, it was an interesting ride; there were roadhouses with fuel, supplies, bars (!) and occasionally emus every fifty miles or so along the route, and not much else. I expected the landscape to be something akin to Mars, but apparently it has rained more than normal over the past few years so there was a lot grass and trees, making it feel a bit like Utah or Arizona with camel farms.

Uluru is just as unique and impressive as we thought it would be, a huge sandstone monolith rising from the flatness all around it. We had a bit of time to enjoy it from a couple of viewpoints yesterday before heading off to a fancy dinner under the stars where we watched the sun set on the giant rock while a man played the didgeridoo and we were served drinks and appetizers. Dinner started under a black sky with thousands of bright stars, but then an intense moonrise lit up the horizon, brightening the clouds and revealing the landscape. All the while they kept bringing drinks and food, and if I haven’t recently mentioned how the karma gods must have me confused with someone else, this dinner was yet another example of an experience that I’m not sure I deserved, but that we’ll remember forever.

After a late night and a lot of drinks I woke up at 5:15 this morning to catch the sunrise, jumping on the hop-on hop-off bus into the park. The bus left the sunrise viewing area a bit sooner than I would have liked, but from there they dropped me off for a hike to circumnavigate Uluru, which I was able to do at my own pace. The rock is amazingly scenic, with colors changing throughout the morning. I had to keep my camera in the bag for much of the hike since the aboriginal people do not want certain areas photographed, but it’s tough to capture how monumental it is from up close anyhow. Audrey came out on a later bus and did a walk of her own, and we finished the day with a nighttime visit to the Field of Light art installation covering 700 m² outside of the park and containing 50,000 lights, so we’re both going to be heading to bed tired, dusty, and fulfilled tonight.

Also, flies are terrible creatures.

After a week of diving in Christmas Island, today I decided that we should visit the Aquarium of Western Australia so we could figure out the names of all of the fish we’ve been seeing. It was actually a really good aquarium, with a 100m long tunnel through a 3 million liter tank being the highlight, although they also had a swimming-pool sized coral reef tank which Audrey and I agreed is something we should get after we win the Powerball.

The afternoon adventure was a walk through the 988 acre King’s Park in downtown Perth. It’s bigger than New York’s Central Park, and two-thirds of it is preserved native bush, while the rest is landscaped mostly with plants from Western Australia, making it a very attractive place for local birds. The highlight of this visit was a walkway 50 feet above the ground in the tree canopy, with the smell of eucalyptus and the sound of birds filling the air. Additionally, just this morning I commented to Audrey that we haven’t seen kookaburras in a while, and this afternoon we encountered five of them huddled together on top of a streetlight. It was an incredibly cute and un-photogenic scene, but one finally flew to the top of a nearby tree, providing our first opportunity for a photo of a kookaburra that wasn’t on an electrical line or other man-made object.

Tomorrow we’re flying to Alice Springs for a brief visit to the red center of Australia. We’ve been traversing timezones at a rapid rate lately – Christmas Island is one hour behind Perth, and Perth is 1.5 hours behind Alice Springs – so sunrise wakeups over the next few days may be interesting challenges, but I’m looking forward to seeing some iconic landscapes in the morning light.

We’re in Perth for two days in between visits elsewhere, and after sleeping in due to a very late arrival last night we spent most of today catching up on exciting things like laundry and photo editing. While I’m sure everyone probably wants to read a recap of our amazing day (I have so many clean clothes now), instead here are a few frames from GoPro video taken during our four days of scuba diving on Christmas Island.

When we arrived on Christmas Island there was a group of kids and adults waving to the plane from just outside of the airport fence. It seemed cute at the time, but a week later as we’re leaving I was thinking about that moment again, and when your whole world is a 52 square mile island that is totally isolated in the midst of the vast ocean, the twice-weekly arriving flight really is a big deal. The flight means that you’ll get to see new visitors and returning residents in the coming days, that fresh produce will be onboard in the styrofoam coolers that so many people bring with them, and it’s the one time that there’s a direct connection to the rest of the planet. If I was a kid growing up on the island, I’d probably wave, too.

It’s sad to be leaving, but we tried to make the most of our last day. I spent a couple of hours down on the cliffs photographing birds again early this morning, then Audrey and I departed our awesome house rental for the last time, dropped off our borrowed locator beacon at the police station, and said goodbye to the ladies who have been helping us out all week at the visitor center. From there we headed through the park to Margaret Knoll, and discovered one of the island’s best spots for bird photography – I’m not quite sure how we missed it this whole time, but both Audrey and I came away with some keepers.

Our last stop for the trip was Dolly Beach, which turned out to be down the roughest road we’ve yet encountered – maybe not the smartest place to visit when the twice-weekly flight departs in just five hours. To give credit where it’s due, our rental car looks like it should be taken out back and shot, and it sounds like it’s about to fall to pieces when you drive it, but the thing got us over some gnarly terrain and up and down some steep grades. Ironically, after surviving the route to the Dolly Beach trailhead, the trail itself was in the best condition of anything we’ve hiked here, with a nice boardwalk most of the way. It rained a bit as we arrived, which apparently triggers every crab on the island to come out and play, so Audrey will have another half a million photos of red, blue and robber crabs to edit during our flight back to Perth. Since the road to the trailhead took longer than expected we had to cut the hike short and didn’t actually see the beach, which gives us yet another reason to return some day. While rattling our way back to the airport we also got a tiny taste of what the red crab migration must be like as we dodged hundreds of crabs who had been triggered by the rain and decided to come out to frolic in the road.

It’s going to be a shock to the system going from an island of 1700 people to Perth and its two million residents, but we’re there for just a couple of days before the trip takes us back to some of Australia’s more remote locations. This three month adventure is moving along a bit too quickly, but as hoped, every day feels like it is creating memories that will last a lifetime.

I have been outside photographing birds so often over the past week that we now run into strangers on trails who recognize me and ask how the photos came out. But it’s been a fun endeavor, and the golden bosuns were finally cooperative today, even though they still made me work for the photos, at one point hovering near some cliffs for several minutes only to start soaring overhead again once I had run down a few dozen stairs to the cliff’s edge. Thankfully, in the end we came to an agreement and I walked away with a few nice shots.

After starting the day photographing birds on my own for a few hours, I came back to pick up Audrey – she insists that when you’re on a tropical island you should have time to lounge, which I disagree with vehemently – and we headed off to the police station to borrow a locator beacon. We later realized that the island is much smaller than we thought, so we might have been overcautious in carrying a beacon when you could probably walk across the entire island in half a day, but with very limited cell coverage (calls work in town, but no data anywhere), and roads that sometimes rattle the car so much that you’re still shaking when the drive ends, it didn’t hurt to have an extra safety device along for the ride.

Our destination for the day was an area on the far side of the island called the Dales, so named for tiny freshwater trickles that flow through the area, and which we chose due to its variety of crabs. The red crabs, whose annual migration make the island famous, are everywhere, as are the giant robber crabs (albeit in much smaller numbers), but this area is also home to blue crabs, or “Luigis” as Nadine at the visitor center named them for their mustache markings. Between the huge spiders that we again encountered and the many, many crabs scuttling about in the jungle, Audrey spent the hike very much in her happy place.

The trail was reasonably easy to follow until its end, where Nadine had told us “just follow the water downhill and climb over the rocks, there’s no markings”. After bushwhacking over jagged rock, repeatedly crossing the small creek, and pushing our way through the jungle, we eventually got to a dropoff into a small gorge with a sign at its head containing numerous warnings about the terrain ahead, including (ironically) an admonition to “stay on the marked trail”; it is fair to say that anyone reading that warning had long ago decided to do exactly the opposite.

We’ve got a half day remaining here tomorrow before our flight departs, and while I’ve chosen Tasmania as the place I would move to if I had to leave the USA, Audrey has decided that we’ll need to split our time between Tassie and Christmas Island. It’s been a good week.

The white-tailed tropic birds (aka “golden bosuns”) continue to elude me, at least when I have a camera in hand; three of them were swooping overhead as we returned from diving this morning, but during the several hours that we were out on the cliffs taking photos they disappeared almost completely. These birds are clearly playing some sort of twisted mind game with me, and so far they are winning.

Today was our last day of diving on Christmas Island, and despite seas that looked like they were going to be rough, the trip out to our dive site in Hama’s small boat wasn’t the roller coaster we expected. The dive crew consists of Hama, the company owner, and Lynny, a 75 year old divemaster who you would guess was in her fifties based on how she gets around on the boat. She’s also got a memorable personality: today we had two other people scuba diving with us who are also avid free divers, and they mentioned being able to free dive to depths of 70+ meters. With steep dropoffs all around the island (it’s an ancient volcano) Lynny said to them after our first dive “I saw you two swimming out to the edge there and look down, and thought to myself ‘good god they better not'”. Thankfully no one decided to test the limits of their dive equipment today, and we had another good day of diving.

After saying thanks and goodbye to Lynny and Hama we went off again to see the birds, although it also turned out to be a trip to find several softball-sized spiders for my arachnid-loving travel companion. At one point one of their massive webs blocked half of the trail down to the cliff edge, and while Audrey says the orb weavers aren’t dangerous, I strongly suspect that particular spider web was built with hopes and dreams of ensnaring a hiker.

On our second birding stop a red-footed booby had somehow managed to get itself onto the wrong side of the cliff-edge fence, and was in a panic trying to take off through the wire, so I got to play the role of booby rescuer as I gently lifted the bird to the top of the fence where it had the airspace needed to take flight. Oddly it calmed down completely when I picked it up, briefly assessed its situation from its new perch, and eventually took a dive off of the cliff and glided back to its home as if nothing was amiss. Operation booby rescue thus ended in a massive success, making the lack of cooperation from the golden bosuns an easier pill to swallow.

We’ve got a day and a half remaining on the island, so tomorrow we’re planning to head to the far side through the jungle. We’re pretty sure our rental car will survive the “road” that leads there, but the police station loans out personal locator beacons to reduce the number of people disappearing without a trace, so we may take them up on that loan offer before departing.

The golden bosuns remain elusive, but they will not defeat me, and mark my words, there will be a photo of that unique bird in a journal entry before we leave. Probably.

We weren’t diving until noon today, and Audrey wanted the morning to lounge, so I got up early to photograph birds, and luckily a few of them were showing off. I later made a trip to Flying Fish Cove and the visitor center, but after an hour of waiting to see who might fly by I returned with only two photos: one of a grasshopper who had been giving me the stink eye while I was there, and the other of a butterfly who I think was taking pity on me and wanted to make sure I got at least one nice picture.

For our afternoon scuba diving the seas were a bit choppy, so Hama put us in the water only a short boat ride from the jetty, but we still had good dives. Today’s fishes included more lionfish, at least three different species of eels, shrimp, giant clams, but most memorably we had a return visit from the giant trevally. During our surface interval between dives another boat was moored nearby filleting their catch, which is what the trevally were there for. Not wanting to miss the show I jumped in with a snorkel and found myself in the midst of a trevally feeding frenzy every time another bit of meat hit the water. The frigate birds also got in on the fun and were trying to snatch fish out of the air before the trevally could get to it, so it was quite a hectic event. Hama decided to join in since he apparently keeps a jar of sardines on his boat, but his aim was a little too good and I had to dodge a sardine in the water as a four foot long fish lunged behind me to grab it. It was yet another unique adventure on a trip that has been filled with them.

There’s a bar with snacks a short walk from our house that is open only on Saturday evenings, so we ended the day with drinks and calamari under tropical skies with stars overhead. We’ve got a couple of days left on this island, and while I had initially feared that seven days on Christmas Island might be a bit too long, I don’t think we would have had any issue if our stay been even longer.