Awesome!!!
Trip Start
Dec 28, 2003
1
42
83
Trip End
Aug 2004
Great Barrier Reef,
Australia
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
When I left home I had a list of certain things I wanted to do and one of those was to fly over the Great Barrier Reef - well yesterday I blew the budget and did it!!! It was the best thing I have ever done - come to Australia for the day just to do it!!!!!! There were 4 of us on the trip, in a plane designed to hold seven, so we had a lot of room. Our pilot was a very handsome Aussie who actually owned the Air Whitsunday company, so we were in good (and very rich!) hands. The plane was ace - she was a little sea plane, which meant we could land on the water - trouble was she was a little small! We left the airport and flew over the Whitsunday Islands - the weather was not great and the view was spoiled a little, but we still had a great view. We flew to Whitehaven Beach, circled for photos and then landed near the beach, where we had a champagne lunch!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The beach was deserted when we arrived, but (and this is the best bit!) just as we were about to leave two huge ferries arrived filled with hundreds of people to invade our beach, so we packed up, got into the plane and took off from the water - how posh is that!!!!!!!!!!!????????????!!!!!!!!
Heart Reef
!It took about 15 minutes to reach the reef (its 100 km off the coast!), but suddenly, there it was - all you could see at first were waves breaking over it in the middle of the ocean, but was we flew further you could see its full beauty - think of all the ariel photos you have seen of the reef, double the colours and treble the beauty - it was the most amazing thing I have seen in my life - all 4 of us on the plane were gobsmacked - awesome. We flew over Hardy Reef, which is where the famous Love Heart Reef is - that looked exactly like the photos as well, and I took the most incredible photos. I even saw a turtle swimming in one of the lagoons.
After flying around for a while it was time to land - this was where the sea plane came into itself - the company had a boat permanently moored in Blue Lagoon, in the middle of Herdy reef - no one else can get in there - the tides are only high enough a few times a year, so we were really alone! The plane landed and we transfered onto the boat, which had a glass bottom - as soon as we began moving we saw two reef sharks and endless fish and coral. We stopped a little away from the plane and began snorkeling - amazing, everything was so big. Greg said the other Emma and I could snorkel back to the plane and he would meet us there - on the way we saw the sharks again, but that was no where near as scary as the other thing I saw
Reef 1
! Imagine - swimming along minding your own business just looking at the fish, when suddenly out of the corner of my eye I saw this thing - ok it was a fish, but this fish was the size of a house!!!!!!!!!!! No joke - not a story where the fish gets bigger each time you tell it, it was really that big!!! Of course I had a little panic (wouldn't you?) and tried to swim quickly to Emma, but by the time we had got back the thing was gone!!!! I told Greg and he said there is a Potato Cod in the lagoon and it had to be that - he had seen it once, but it was very rare to see it - does that mean I was lucky??!! Anyway he said it was about 3m long and 2m tall - yes, I quite believe him - it was huge!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Of course after the shock I had to drink some more wine!!!!!!!!!!
We took off from the reef and flew over some more of it - I have actually bought a poster of the area we swam in today, so on cold, wet winter days I can look at the picture and say hello to the cod!!!!!! I had such a fantastic day, its going to be hard to beat (but I will try!). Tomorrow I am off to Cape Tribulation for 3 days then back to Cairns and the day after I am going to the Tablelands for 2 days - busy, busy!!
