Sending you a Postcard: Diving at the Great Barrier Reef

One thing checked off from my bucket list – diving at the Great Barrier Reef! (Sorry, mom.) You are now looking at a certified open water diver, I did a 4-day-course with Down Under Dive at Cairns at the Great Barrier Reef with Sari and Roope (Ville did his advanced level [Ville huom.]). So cool!

PADI is the biggest and most well-known diving organization in the world, so if you do your certificates with them, you can basically dive anywhere in the world. Open water diver is the 1^st level - you go through basics of diving and safety, and it allows you to dive down to 18 meters. Advanced or adventure are next levels increasing your allowed depth down to 30 meters and opening possibilities for specials (rescue/night/wreck/photography etc). Diving is amazing – it’s another world down there, you see amazing things and creatures, and the surroundings and your own body control are completely different. The main thing is to concentrate on your breathing all the time, and another interesting thing is communicating with gestures only.

As said, our course with Down Under Dive took 4 days – 2 days of theory and pool training and 2 days on the reef. Our instructor was very inspiring and funny Italian guy, and our group consisted of eight students from all around the world – one Canadian, two Koreans, one Dutch, one Australian-”Kiwi” and us, three Finns. Great group, and on the last night we all spend a night out before, in our case, leaving Cairns.

Great Barrier Reef is the biggest living structure on earth – it consists of corals that might grow only for 1cm per year, and it is home to hundreds of fishes and other sea creatures. The reef stretches for 2600kms from the most Northern point of Australia all the way down to Fraser Island, and it is about the size of Germany. Cairns is the nearest point on land to the reef and therefore the town is strongly focused on water activities such as diving.

During the course our Italian instructor told us a lot about the reef and different sea creatures and we even saw most of them! We saw a giant green turtle both at the surface from a boat and super close to us at the bottom while diving (“I showed ‘im my Visa and said, ‘Turtle, at two o’clock!’” – Instructor), a very nosy ”pet” maori wrass called Wallie that bit our instructor (“Don’t know why she did that, Wallie loves people and you can ‘ug them and ‘old them, she must ‘ave been jealous..”), few whitetip reef sharks (“Sharks only ‘ave a bad reputation, reef sharks are the kindest things, they would never attack a diver!”), a big trigger fish gazing firmly at us his fin up (“They are just guarding their ‘ome and backyard, but you should go around them...”), a clownfish (“You’ll see Nemo, I know where Nemo’s ‘ouse is!”) and many many many other things that I can’t even name (“They are all our FRIENDS!”)

All in all, I really enjoyed diving and I am looking forward to find a next spot for a dive. In fact, I’m a bit angry with myself for leaving Cairns, I think I should have skipped one night in Magnetic Island (our next stop) in order to complete Adventure level at the Great Barrier Reef... But yeah, next time then!

Buddy Check

Finding Nemo

Can you spot him? (Saw him closer but we were a bit slow with the camera...)

Luckily Ville turned out to be a better photographer than I and actually got the Green Sea Turtle in the picture while later on snorkling on the reefs by Whitsunday