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underwater Discover a whole new world

The first group of divers descended into the crystal clear waters of the Pacific at the Castle Rock dive site and Axle made a few lazy swings of his tail and gently glided into their view. Then came the part he loved the best. As soon as he was spotted by the divers their smooth fluid movements turned into jerky contortions as they tried to draw each others attention towards Axle and simultaneously gestured the “ok” sign forming a ring with the thumb and the forefinger – the universal sign that divers use to indicate an awesome sighting under water.

He swam right up to one of the divers who seemed the most excited and stayed with him, enjoying the look of amazement plastered on his face behind his mask.

Behind my mask I continued to stay wonderstruck as I watched the big 1.2-meter long Malabar Cod swim away. On the boat during the pre-dive briefing, the dive master had mentioned that we might see the cod, but I hadn’t expected the fish to swim up to me, peer into my mask and demand attention and pampering.

It had been a wonderful day so far. That morning I’d driven up to the Marina Mirage in Port Douglas, Queensland, Australia and checked into the Quicksilver’s Dive Centre where I’d pre-booked a diving trip out to the Great Barrier Reef.

I was grouped along with three other divers and Richard our dive master briefed us about the dive. The first site that we were heading out to was called Phil’s Reef. When we moved to the back of the boat, a nippy breeze was merrily blowing and the swaying of the boat too didn’t really make things comfortable as I struggled to put on my wetsuit, then my diving gear along with the heavy tank, the weight belt and finally the long flippers.

But as soon as I was in the water the entire struggle to get the equipment on faded to inconsequence as an entirely different world revealed itself to me. The corals were like I’d never seen before, multi-hued and densely saturated in CMYK they seemed to have been stained by a rainbow. As we approached coral bommies, fish seemed to explode from them like a lazy geyser and these huge schools of fish would come at us in a tight bunch only parting at the last possible moment to go past us in a streamlined fashion.

Nestled among the tentacles of sea anemones, resplendent in orange and white was Nemo, the Clownfish made popular by the animated movie “Finding Nemo”. In the meantime, a brown and cream coloured Spotted Eagle Ray was lazily winging itself across the coral. After an hour or so at that site, the skipper hauled anchor and headed to Castle Rock another dive site on the Agincourt Reef, the outer most reef of the Barrier Reef System. We descended down and met up with Axle, the Malabar Cod. The visibility here, at over 30 meters, was even great than the previous site. This made the colours of the coral brighter. Here there were dense and multi-hued coral gardens that were almost perfectly manicured by the sea and marine life. Fish swam amongst them making the scene appear like an underwater Sunday village market.

Scuba diving isn’t an instant water sport such as rafting or jet skiing, you can do ‘try dives’ but to really enjoy it you need to get certified. And once you do and discover the sights, colours and secrets the ocean holds, you’ll be hooked like I am. Get certified, there is a whole new world waiting to be experienced under water!

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