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The Reef

May 6, 2007
The day after the Daintree, The Wife™ and I took a day relaxing at the hotel. We got a massage together, grabbed some much needed fish and chips, and then worked on our my much needed tan. It was a good day to take a break as we had a water date scheduled for our last full day in Palm Cove.

After seeing the rain forest, the only other main thing to do up in Queensland is to visit the Great Barrier Reef. We made a last minute decision to sign up for a guided snorkeling tour with a marine biologist, and we couldn't have been more happy with that decision.

It took about 90 minutes to reach the edge of the reef traveling on a huge catamaran carrying 500+ people. Right as we got there, we threw on our lycra suits (to protect against jellyfish) and dove right into the reef to check out the fish and the coral.

To back up for a second, when we were on the plane flying to Australia, I told Christi I wanted to see two things. 1) A croc in the wild. 2) A shark in the wild.

To keep the suspense to a minimum, I saw both of my target goals. About 15 minutes into our guided tour, I got a little ahead of the other 3 people, and I spotted a white tip reef shark. I swam with it for about 30 seconds, and then tried to catch back up, but obviously could not. Christi did not get to see it, so I became determined for the rest of the tour to try to spot another one.

Our tour guide popped up at the end of our tour and said we need to start swimming back to the boat. Just as we started, we spotted another shark. I gray reef whaler this time. I was happy that we were both able to spot and swim with some sharks out in the big blue sea. It was quite the experience. Hopefully one of the pictures I took with my underwater camera captured at least one of the sharks on our tour. We'll know when we get them developed a little later. As for my pictures, it was tough to get a good shot of the reef from our boat. You really needed to go up in the helicopters to get a good view of all of the colors at once. Here's the best I did:

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