Great Barrier Reef Day 3 and back to Cairns

July 14 – Great Barrier Reef Day 3

We were up bright and early for our 6am dive. We actually went in the water a little later than that as we moved dive sites and headed back to Fish Bowl. Our dive wasn't as exciting as some of our others, we headed down the wall to start our dive profile off deep enough. We saw a sleeping turtle and some fish but otherwise it was pretty quiet. Back at the boat we got some breakfast which was similar to yesterday then had to pack our room up and check out before our 8am dive. It was a bit of a rush. We got back in the water and it seemed the fish had woken up. We saw a juvenile bat fish, a couple of reef sharks and a well hidden blue spotted ray. Back at the boat the sun had started to show its face, finally! We moved back to 360deg Coral Garden and had our last dive at 11am. We got the see Larry the barracuda that usually hangs out under the boat. We also saw a huge school of parrot fish, I didn't know parrot fish hung out in schools. We had some lunch up on the sundeck in the sunshine. We could still go for a snorkel at 1pm but I decided to enjoy the sunshine instead but Beau took advantage and hopped in with the water camera. Then we had to say goodbye to the Kangaroo Explorer and board Reefkist. We had a 2hr ride back to Cairns with a short stop at Fitzroy Island again. We had a quick stop for some whales too but they weren't as active or as close as last time. I read my book up on deck while Beau pseudo-napped. Once at the marina we were shuttled back to the dish shop and picked up Dotti. We headed to the caravan park we stayed at before and got settled in. We both enjoyed a hot shower before setting out to find some where to eat dinner. There ended up being a good little Thai place up the street and we had a yummy meal of padthai. Beau had an e-mail from Bombardier confirming a phone interview in 3 weeks time. We went to bed pretty early since we were both too pooped to poop.

Yellow one is a Foxface Rabbit Fish

Nemo!

Briggs Reef from above

July 15 – Cairns

We sort of took advantage of the fact we didn't have to be up early but really we didn't sleep in too late. We did some laundry before heading into town. We were all excited because we had two showings of the van today. Once in town we met an Italian couple and they had a look over the van. Beau took them for a test drive but for some reason the they didn't actually drive it themselves. We thought we had a second showing an hour later but it turned out to be the same couple. They had e-mailed us and texted and we replied to both but obviously they didn't keep track too well. Their English wasn't great either. We had some lunch at an Irish pub which included a pot (small glass) of beer. We wandered around downtown and got a 30 cent ice cream to enjoy on the board walk. We decided to head back to the caravan park and maybe hang out at the pool. Back at the park we got changed but then decided to try to fix the windshield instead. It didn't go as well as we had hoped and the sun hide itself away so it wasn't really good pool weather anymore. We did get a text from the Italians wanted to know about getting QLD rego and if we'd take $6000. We said we'd get back to them because we wanted to see how the safety we had scheduled for tomorrow would go. We took our camp chairs over to the pool area, the seats their were full of French people, and started doing some research on changing over the registration. It looked to be simple enough but we figured we should give them a call about the proof of address thing; in NSW just a receipt from a motel was good enough. We made some dinner and watched some tv. I set to work on updating my journal and trying to get some pictures fixed up. We got some stuff posted to our websites before bed.

Cairns Harbour

July 16 – Van stuff

We had to get Dotti in for her road worthiness check this morning at 8am. We dropped her off and walked into the Cairns CBD. It was pretty quiet since most things hadn't opened yet. We wandered around checked out some used bookstores, and souvenir shops. We killed some time in an electronics store too. We called the QLD rego people but found out we had to have a permanent QLD address to change our registration. I'm not sure what other backpackers do but I guess we wouldn't be able to do the registration here. We finally got a call about the van about 3 hrs after we dropped it off. We walked back to the garage and they had some bad news for us. She hadn't passed her road worthiness and had quite a few deficiencies. Crap... some of them were dumb though and I don't think we'll have a problem down in NSW but we'll definitely have to fix some of them. On our way back to the caravan park we popped into an auto parts store to start pricing out the parts we might need. Back at the caravan park we started googling some of the work that needed to be done hoping we (Beau) could do it ourselves. We called the Italian couple to tell them about not being able to do the QLD registration and they said they didn't want it then. Fine, we'll just sell Dotti to someone more deserving then. We started looking at some of the easier fixes in the van, we found the windshield wiper pump needed to be replaced and a fuse was blown for the heater fan. We rode our bikes down to the auto parts store and picked up these items as well as detoured to the grocery store. We now have functional wiper juice and heater. After dinner we started planning a route back to Sydney and figured out any stops we might want to make on the way back down.