Diving The Great Barrier Reef - 2004 : Wednesday

We were up and out to the cab at 4:45. We checked in with Virgin Blue, who made Randy check his camera gear. The woman at the desk was clearly in a bad mood and thought it was too heavy (it's considerably smaller than many other bags we saw people get on with). We got lucky and had three exit row seats on both flights. In Sydney we collected bags, changed terminals, checked in and headed to first class lounge. It was very quiet, and we made ourselves some sandwiches. We boarded the flight and took off. After dinner we watched Shark Tales and then took some ambien and slept for about 7 hours. We woke up with only an hour and a half to go, which was taken up with breakfast. The flight had gone by really quickly! Immigration and customs were a breeze, and the limo was waiting to take us home.

It had been a fantastic trip! We really want to thank all of the crew and our fellow divers for making the week so enjoyable. The mix of people from all over the world was really fun, and everyone had been so much fun to hang out with!

Hmmm, where shall we go dive next?

Gear List

Both of us - Uwatec Air-Z Nitrox computers, Scubapro regulators, SeaQuest BC's

Cameras

Between the two of us we took about 2200 pictures during the week, about 7GB worth! Both of our cameras worked really well. Randy's new Hugyfot housing was great, with nice physical controls on the outside, a great 'squeeze' shutter release and an extremely well made exterior. It has a great 'feel' to it, and the fast shutter response on the LC1 camera made it much easier to capture fast moving fish. We have two batteries and memory cards for each camera, and swapped them out every other dive so we could look at the pictures on the laptop.

Randy - Panasonic LC1 5MP camera, Hugyfot underwater housing, Sea and Sea YS-90 Auto strobe. UK Q40 spotting lights.

Rick - Sony T1 5MP camera, Sony underwater housing, Sea and Sea YS-25 Auto strobe. UK Light Cannon underwater light.