After the conference, a few of us headed off on a day trip to Michaelmas Cay on the Great Barrier Reef with Ocean Spirit (http://www.oceanspirit.com.au/) on a catamaran. Gemma had hired an underwater camera so a number of the pictures on here are from it. It was quite a rough journey out to the Cay and a few of us felt quite sea sick on the way.... :-( However, it was a beautiful day with virtually no clouds in the sky - real potential sunburn territory!!!!
However, when we finally arrived the snorkelling more than made up for the seasickness! We donned our wetsuits to try to stop us from burning and to keep us as warm as possible in the water so we could spend the maximum amount of time out there. We had a quick snorkelling guided tour of parts of the reef and had some interesting marine life pointed out to us. Then we went off by ourselves for a bit and saw heaps of different things - giant clams, Nemo's, parrot fish, coral, sea cucumbers etc....
Perhaps one of the most exciting things we saw was a turtle really close up to us.... The turtle was awesome and we saw him going up to the surface of the water to breathe.... really cool!
Michaelmas Cay is also a nature reserve for birds so we could not go wandering around it as we would disturb the nesting areas. however, we did get some great views of lots of different sea birds too!
We then unfortunately had to head back to Cairns and brave the seasickness again.... luckily, we were given a medicinal glass of champagne that helped!!!!! The crew put up the sails and we actually sailed part of the way back as well which was great fun....
All in all, an excellent day out on the reef!
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