Life at sea

I'ts been a while since my last update and a fair amount has changed. I'm no longer working for Tusa dive but instead working for Spirit of Freedom which is basically the same company but is the luxury live aboard that does week long trips up through the ribbon reefs to the cod hole then out into the coral sea and to Osprey reef which is a detached reef 200km from shore.

My current work schedual looks basically like this. The trips last 7 days, the go out monday around noon and return to port the following monday around 6am. I work from roughly 5:45am each day till around 9pm each night. Except for Saturday and the last monday that I have to be working by about 5:30am.

We do up to 5 dives a day on the boat at usaully 3 differnt dive sites each day. This means that pretty much when people aren't diving we are moving the boat, so we are more or less always on the move. The boat itself is 36m and can carry up to 26 passengers and has a crew of 10. The cleintel we deal with also is very different from the day boat. The cost to come for the week on SoF starts around $3,000 for the week and goes up from there. So most of the passengers tend to be North American or European and tend to be slightly older with the average age probably in the 50's. The fact that we are also much farther from land has a lot of complications also as I learned my second week out on the boat where we had 3 medical emeregencies in 1 week.

First of all on the first dive tuesday morning when one diver was exiting the water they caught their fin on the ladder and fell over breaking their ankle seveirly. Once we stablelized her and got her leg braced we had to steam the boat to lizard island where their is an airstrip to get her flown out to a hospital. To simply get her off the boat their we had to put her in a streacher and use the crane to lower her over the side into the tender to take her to land. Then carry her up the beach get her loaded into a van to get her to the airstrip then get her on the plane to take her back to Cairns. After returning from the trip we found out that she went into surgery and had to have a plate and 2 pins put in to fix her ankle.

That following night we had a bit of comic relief provided by our deckhand Bryce. In the evening because of the lights on the boat hundreds of fish are attracted to it because they feed by the light coming from the boat. This however means there is a very large school of fish often off the back of the boat at night. So Bryce had the bright idea of trying to catch a fish by jumping off the back of the boat. Unfortunately he found out red bass have a skull plate thicker than him, and ended up splitting his lip in half when he jumped in and landed on one. This called for the skipper of the boat to play doctor and stitch his lip back together while the rest of the crew sat arround taking pictures and making jokes all in the confines of the infurmory/wheel house of the boat. That being said I think Tony might have found a new calling as a doctor because the stitchs turned out amazingly well.

It wasn't for a few more days that we had our 3rd medical emergency. On Thursday aftering having just left Lizard Island for the second time in the trip after having taken on more passengers there as norming one passenger started to complain that he was having problems with his eye and that he was losing he sight out of it. After getting on the phone to a doctor we were forced to turn the boat around once again and return to lizard island for a 3rd time to have him taken off by plane so he could get to a specialist. So this all made for more than a little interesting trip.

The diving is much better out on Osprey than it is right out of Cairns. Cod hole left me rather unimpressed seeing as all it is is a bunch of giant cods that are only there because they are hand fed every day. Osprey is amazing though, its basically a mountain coming up in the middle of the ocean just to the surface. It is 24km long and 10km wide, and it drops down off the side to more than 1300m deep. You can dive there to 40m and see down another 40m and watch as it just gets darker and darker. And it litteral looks like looking down a snow covered mountain because all the sand and coral looks like rocks and snow. The reef also attracks a lot of bigger stuff. We do a shark feed there every week which brings in 50-60 sharks some of which are oceanic silver tips that can get close to 3m long. On other dives we could easily see 5-6 sharks along with eagle rays and there are often manta rays though i haven't seen any yet.

I also have some more good news, I have secured my job in the Carribean for when I am finished here in Australia. So I'll be returning to Canada on the 30th of March then heading down to NC for training in May then heading from there down to the Carribean for the summer.