Aussie Adventures: Day 2

Today was fantastic! I woke up feeling great and ready to swim with Nemo! During our prep course for New Zealand, the girls that were all going to Cairns decided we MUST do a snorkeling day throughout the Great Barrier Reef. It really was amazing. Imagine a dentist office fish tank and then picture swimming in a gigantic one multiplied by 100.

The coolest parts were:

Really Big Clams: there were some really big clams. I’ve never seen clams like this before. They looked like giant rocks that were split down the middle with a lot of colors inside of them. Whenever you would move your hands near them, I think it freaked them out they would close up really fast.

Blue Clams: These little blue clams were really cool too. They had wavy lines with sapphire blue inside of them. These seemed to grow actually inside of the coral. Just like the big clams they closed up really fast whenever you moved near them, but they would actually be interactive. They would then open back up and close over and over again. They were very entertaining.

Little Yellow Fish: There was this flock of bright yellow fish that showed up out of the middle of nowhere. It was hilarious because they saw Mandy and they wouldn’t leave her alone! Once she finally got rid of them, they started following me everywhere. They tickled me and it was weird. Let’s just say they are very social fish.

Glowing Fish: This fish was super cool. Every time we saw it literally looked like it was glowing. And it had a mouth that kind of looked like a trumpet and it blew lots of “O” shaped bubbles.

Turtles: For the grand finale we had were able to see sea turtles! It was quite awesome. We were all talking about how we wanted to swim with sea turtles and then we saw one. It reminded me of Crush from Finding Nemo. He was so chill and was just floating there. The turtle even let us touch him! 

Glass Bottom Boat: After we went snorkeling we went on a glass bottom boat tour. This was really cool because it took you out a lot further than we were allowed to snorkel for safety reasons. This was really cool. They also did a fish feeding and it was crazy to see how all of these huge fish jumping and stuff to get some of the food. It was pretty rad.