January 3, 2007: Queensland, Australia

A New Years in Australia 2007 dive

"Challenger Bay (Cairns)" - "Cod Hole (Cairns)" - "Challenger Bay (Cairns)"

Diving off the northeast coast of Australia:

• Directions from Tampa: Um. Well, talk to a travel agent. It's in another hemisphere, no matter how you look at it ...
• Conditions on the day of my visit: Sunny
  
  
• Personal Notes: They started us off explaining that the best thing to do was get some depth, as reverse profiles (diving deeper on a later dive than a prior one) was not allowed. At Challenger Bay, this was kind of difficult and involved a lot of swimming over sand. Paul was dissatisfied with this particular requirement on this particular site.
  
  Cod Hole was a really nice site and the cod were not at all afraid. Where you can go a whole dive seeing only fish butts because they are afraid of you, if you swam over a section of coral and weren't paying attention you might swim right by a very large cod.
  
  The second dive at Cod Hole involved our trip director feeding a large cod. There were others around the site, but only this guy (and a large Napoleon Wrasse) bothered to show up. They actually had a dive master around to keep the Napoleon Wrasse busy, as he knew how to get the food out of the bucket they were using.
  
  Video that I showed after the night dive had divers saying that they were going to start following Paul and I around. It seems that we saw a lot of stuff that they didn't.

Challenger Bay (Cairns)
This fish (which I'm guessing is a Sweetlips) was very large.
Cod Hole (Cairns)
Here are a couple of Firedart Fish.
Here's a shot of just one of them.
This is a closeup of something ...
It was a closeup of this Sea Cucumber.
I've been spotted by this Pink Anemoniefish.
I'm guessing this is some kind of tunicate.
At first you probably don't think this fish is very big. But this Cod is probably a good two, two and a half feet long.
He was getting his teeth cleaned at the time.
This is a Speckled Sandperch, perched on the sand.
Another very large Cod ...
And an illustration of just how big the Cod in general were. That's Paul getting a nice wide angle shot.
Paul likes taking pictures of things that pose for him.
Here's a closeup of the Cod's eye.
Paul almost missed this Moray. I think it's a Giant Moray, but I could be wrong on my ID (besides, I'm not so sure we were in the proper area - or maybe he wasn't).
Paul noticed that the teeth on this Cod - well, half of them appear to be missing.
Challenger Bay (Cairns)
I can only guess that this is some kind of Coralimorph.
A six legged Sea Star
This was a Sea Cucumber, or so I was told, but not like any of the ones I've seen before. It was very skinny and probably 7 to 8 feet long.
This is a very cool looking nudibranc.