Jeremy in Australia: Remote Area Dive Dive/Camp Safari to Orpheus and Pelorus Island

The weekend after spring break was our dive trip with Remote Area Dive to the Palm Islands. The group was Alex, Kevin, Charlie, Jared, and me. Andrew had to drop out because of lack of funds, and Steve was actually in the hospital for three days after getting bit by a spider so he couldn’t go either. Still, we had a good group and enough people to get a sweet discount. Alex, Kevin, and Charlie were even able to get their Advanced Open Water Certification for only 50 bucks. Not bad.

Christmas Tree Worms

Basket Star

If you want to read my full log of the dives you can do it here:

The short version is that the trip was a lot of fun. We did six dives over two days (including a night dive), and camped on one of the islands at night. The coral at the Palm Islands was like nowhere else I had ever seen on the Great Barrier Reef. It wasn’t that the coral cover was outstanding (it was pretty good), but the diversity and different types of coral on the reefs was really cool. We were seeing coral and things that I didn’t even know what they were. It’s amazing how different the reefs can be even within one reef system like the Great Barrier Reef. Highlights of the dives were tons of nudibranchs, basket stars, thousands of jellyfish, an octopus, lobsters, a “bug”, a whitetip reef shark, a scrawled filefish (one of my favourite fish), a juvenile boxfish, a sea turtle, a couple juvenile lionfish, a wobbegong, and A GIANT CUTTLEFISH!!! I’ve been dying to see one of those since I’ve been here and finally we spotted one. Jared and I made a good buddy team pointing stuff out to each other, and we both had the best dives we’ve ever done in terms of breath control and conserving air. We even lasted a full 60 minutes on one dive, which is the longest bottom time I’ve ever had. Anyway check out the ScubaRadio site for more info on the dives and for sure take a look at the rest of the pictures because there are some pretty good ones.