Harris's Version of His Visit: Part 1

 *Note: this post was written by Harris. We will have our own version of his stay once his side is told. Enjoy!

Greetings from the Guam Airport! Kelley and Maria were gracious enough to let me write a guest post in their blog about our week together. For those of you who don’t know me, I am a recent graduate of the University of Miami. What you should also know is that I like scuba diving a little bit.  At the end of my senior year I decided I would send out my resume to dive boats located in random, remote, and unheard of places. After several months I finally landed a job as a dive guide and scuba instructor for a company operating out of Koror in the Republic of Palau. Which brings me to how I got to Australia. I figured I might as well check out the local area before starting work. I had never been to Australia before. When I went to study abroad I wanted to go to a country known for incredible dive sites that I could go to all semester long, so naturally I chose Scotland. But now that I was heading out to the Pacific, I figured I could visit Kelley and Maria and bum off them for the week while we all toured Australia.

Friday, Sept. 2nd:

After a miserable final week at home I finally escaped the earthquake and hurricane ravaged disaster zone of Long Island, NY and began heading out to the Pacific. The twenty-eight hours of flights went surprisingly well. Qantas had lived up to its reputation of not crashing and killing all of their passengers in a fiery inferno. After a long day of traveling I finally had made it to James Cook University and met up with Maria and Kelley where I was brought up to speed on all their shenanigans of the previous few months. Afterwards I promptly fell asleep, slept for 12 hours and then woke up at 5 am.

Sadly, during the week I was in Australia Maria and Kelley had these pesky classes to attend, so for a lot of the time I was on my own to explore James Cook University and Townsville. This was a very informative few days where I learned that the hill in the center of town is actually a lot taller than it looks, that the Aquarium is only free for people who can’t find the ticket counter, and that campuses that have wallabies and bandicoots (yeah there actually is a such thing as a bandicoot) running around instead of squirrels are really a lot more entertaining.  Also while I was there I discovered that my two hosts' culinary skills were actually quite good. By the time I had arrived they had both learned how to best use some of the stranger Australian ingredients, including the aptly named “Tasty Cheese.”

Fortunately for me, in the middle of the week I managed to convince Maria, being the slacker that she is, to skip a day of class to go out diving.  Kelley, ever the diligent student, decided to go to her lab. The boat met at the dock at 6:30 am for a three-hour trip to the wreck of the S.S. Yongala. The Yongala was a turn of the century passenger liner that went down in 1911 with the loss of all aboard. Today the ship sits in 90 ft of water near the Great Barrier Reef and is home to an incredible array of marine life. As if that wasn’t enough, this time of year humpback whales migrate through the area, and during our trip to the site we saw several of them breaching in the distance. By the way, this is the first time Kelley is hearing about the Whales. Maria and I did not have the heart to tell her that she missed a day with humpback whales in order to look at prawns in an aquaculture facility (sorry Kelley).

I AM SO MAD. ~Kelley

After three hours of traveling we finally got to the site and were ready to go diving.  Before jumping in the captain told us the water was 20 degrees.  Since the number was in metric it was entirely meaningless to Maria and I, but we soon found out that the water was actually a balmy 70 degrees.  The wreck did not disappoint.  Almost immediately after hitting the water we began seeing enormous Jacks, and Trevally the largest of which were easily in excess of 5 ft long. Once we got down to the wreck we began to see equally impressive marine life including a large Queensland grouper, Napoleon Wrasses, Orbicular Batfish, Eagle Rays, Sea Snakes and an uncountable array of tropical fish.  

The entire wreck was covered in soft corals, and was remarkably intact.  When we got to the bow of the wreck we encountered a rather large, and friendly Marbled Stingray that kept the two of us company until we had to turn around. 

To make things even better the nearby humpback whales provided a very relaxing soundtrack to the entire dive. It was a spectacular dive, definitely one of the best I had ever done.

STILL MAD. ~ Kelley

Finally after the two dives and a 3 hour boat trip we were back at JCU and met up with Kelley who was equally exhilarated from her day of prawn handling. We decided to go into Townsville for dinner that night, where I learned that Townsville on a Wednesday night is easily the least exciting place in the world, that buses in Townsville suck, and that Maria has quite the fascination for sea snakes, and is actually incredibly amusing when sleep deprived.

Come back again tomorrow to hear about the rest of our trip!