Easter Weekend

So I'm not really sure why I haven't updated much on this for, well a pretty really long time, sorry about that. Actually maybe it's because the internet at my house is sucking for sure. I'm not sure why, usually it's really fast and good, but maybe I've just been taking advantage of that and then all of the sudden...boom it sucks.

Oh my! It must be POURING outside! I love it when it does that. I tried looking out of my window, but it is pitch black right now. Oh, now it's almost finished, it will be back soon though. It's silly, because the sound that I always hear sounds like my ceiling fan just turned itself onto a higher level, but then I realize that it's the rain. I love the rain when it's so loud.

Anyways, let me tell you about my Easter weekend. JCU had Friday and Monday off, just like everyone else, so we went to Mission Beach with Deanna's host family. Well, really we just caught a ride with them there and back. I forgot how it feels to travel in close proximity with a million brothers and sisters until this weekend. In the car there were the parents in the front seats, Deanna me and Calen in the middle seat, and then Zachary and Jaden in the back seat, and there was a lot of tattle telling, name calling and bugging going on.

Anyways, Mission Beach is 2 ½ hours north of Townsville. We got there and were dropped off at our hostel so we checked in and began to look around. We really wanted to do something adventurous when we were there, but sometimes it is hard to plan things before you get there. After we got settled in the hostel we talked to the lady at the front desk (who reminded me of my 7^th grade Science teacher Mrs. Upton, except not as crazy) and decided to sign up for a SCUBA DIVING course!!! After that we went to eat lunch at a little place down the road, then we went to the beach. Of course, we could only go swimming in the stinger nets, but really didn’t really get in that far. Deanna is really scared of jellies because apparently they aren’t as avid jelly sweepers as the people in Townsville, and it doesn’t go so deep anyways, so we just stayed around the edge collecting coral. Oh! On the way to the stinger nets, we observed and took pictures of Bubble Crabs!! They are tiny crabs, well they can get bigger but we just saw tiny ones, and when they dig their holes they make these round balls of sand and throw them out of their hole. They were EVERYWHERE!

We also collected tons of cuttle fish bones. Then we laid out on the beach for a while and took a little sleep (that’s how Australian’s say took a nap), and when I woke up there were parachuters flying down from the sky at us! It was so wonderful! There were 6 parachutes and I caught the last one just as their parachute was opening. It loved watching them flying down until I thought they were going to land straight on me, but then they turned at the last second and landed about 100 feet from us. It made me want to go parachuting SO badly! I think I will someday. Hm..that night we ate at a restaurant calling Coconutz and I ordered the “Mexican nachos and a Corona” special, and the nachos were soooo amazing. I miss Mexican food so badly, I even told this German girl in our hostel about El Carreton. Oh also that night we met a man named Hiked who works at our hostel and talked tohim for a long time.

Day 2: SCUBA DIVING DAY!!! We finally got up and hour after we said we would, but we still had time to get some brecky and catch our van on time. After everyone from Mission Beach was on the boat, we have to go over to Dunk Island and pick up the rest of the people then after that it was about another hour to get to Nelly’s Reef, which is on the Outer Great Barrier Reef. The water was ridiculously choppy on the way there, and a couple people got sea sick, but I just went to sleep for a little while. After we got there, “Little” Andy who was the dive instructor on the boat gave us a crash course about having to equalized the pressure on your way down and back up when you are in the water with all of your scuba gear on….all you do it hold your nose and pop your ears every meter on your way down. I actually figured out how to pop my ears just with my breathing instead of having to do the nose things. Sorry I’m getting ahead of myself…after that we had to get into our scuba gear…we wore wetsuits, really heavy weights around our stomachs that would help us go down to the bottom of the reef, and the whole backpack-air tank thing. It was SO heavy by the way. We also had on our flippers and masks, and learned out to breathe through our regulators and check our gauges and stuff. The most important thing to remember while you are scuba diving is to not forget to breath! So we have to actually stand up with all of our gear on and walk to the back of the boat, and I’m pretty sure that this was the hardest part about scuba diving for me, haha I almost fell over the whole way there.

Then we jumped off, and hung out around a rope for a while, while we just put our heads under water to become more comfortable with breathing…you know, the whole breathing while you are UNDER WATER thing is quite a crazy sensation. Then we swam away from the boat with Andy and he took us down two at a time (there were three of us at that time) to get used to the pressure, it didn’t bother me at all and I was fine the whole time, Deanna had some trouble for a little while and had to go back up a couple of times, and then the other girl just freaked out and didn’t even really try so we went back to the boat. When Deanna was comfortable enough, we started our first dive, and on this one we held our instructors hands the whole time…on this dive we saw a two meter shark (which kind of freaked me out) and so many beautiful fish and coral. I’ve never seen schools of really big fish together, but we saw a ton of those, I don’t really know much about fish, but I’m pretty sure some of the schools of fish were giant Angel Fish…we got to touch a sea anemone which just kind of stuck to our fingers when we touched it, I think it was actually stinging us but we couldn’t feel it, and then the instructor showed us the bottom of the anemone but fluttering his hand sort of under it, and the under part felt like velvet or something. I had no conception of time when we were under the water, but apparently on the first dive we were under for about 45 minutes! Then we went back up and had some lunch and it was time for the second dive! This time we saw a sting ray, another shark (but smaller, about the same size as the sharks in the touch tank at the Science Center), and a GIANT sea cucumber!! It was probably about 2 ½ or 3 feet and about 6 inches wide. Andy swam to the bottom and brought it up for us to touch, at first we just felt the top of it which was pretty odd, then he flipped his hand over and it had suction cupped itself to his hand! Then we all held it and we accidentally played a little bit of catch with it, but we didn’t harm it at all…it was sooooo crazy. It looked and felt completely fake. On this dive we got to swim by ourselves mostly, I didn’t really hold his hand at all and we were under water for an hour! I did get scared once when we were swimming into murky-ish water a little away from the reef and I just pictured a giant shark coming towards us like in the movies, but don’t worry that didn’t happen.

It’s so hard to explain how you feel when you are scuba diving…I was told that it would be just like I was in a giant fish tank, and that was totally true! Also, I felt like I could have been in space…it was so amazing. Everyone should try it, I want to do it forever.

(check out those sweet marks on our faces from the masks, oh yea!)

Oh dear, on thing bad that did happen was that as soon as we were finished with our second dive, and had clambered our way somehow back onto the boat with all of our million pounds of gear on, a little girl and her dad swam back to the boat and told the people in charge that they had gotten stung by a jelly....thank goodness it wasn't deadly or anything, it was called a Blue Bottom Jelly or something like that.