Diving the Great Barrier Reef

Well, we've returned from three pretty amazing days diving on the outer reef - and after about 10 hours of sleep, I'm finally feeling awake enough to write about it! Ten dives in three days, including two early morning and one night dive, in 4 different dive locations.

We saw everything we wanted to see and more, from rays and sharks to a napping sea turtle to so many fish and corals. Our first site was a little bleached, but the weather was beautiful enough that we were able to move further out in the reef after that and the colors were amazing! We saw butterfly and angel fish the size of dinner platters, a lobster as big as our dog, and mostly small sharks. (Note that we SAW a lobster - I didn't turn into one. The boat very kindly provided quart jugs of SPF 50, and I walked away with an actual tan and no burn at all!!)

We saw a huge variety of sites, some with huge towering walls of reef that went down far deeper than we could go, and some with lots of small, shallow coves. We got spoiled - as our first experience scuba diving outside of the cold Minnesota lake we did our training dives in, it's going to be hard to match this in the future!