Parents Day 15

Friday

Dad rode the bus into Cairns with us, but he opted to spend the day in the city. So Mom and I hurried through a squall of rain into the sleek powerboat which sped us for a good hour out over the swells, in and out of rain patches, once briefly surrounded by a pod of dolphins, popping out at last into a sunlit spot on the outer reef. We donned our snorkel stuff, skipping merrily past the scuba divers in their cumbersome outfits, but I hovered nervously at the back of the boat looking into the water. The swells knocked against the back of the steps, which dropped into nothingness and a big green ocean. Still jittery from yesterday’s crocs, I was convinced that the first thing I’d see upon launch was a Great White, perhaps waiting a hundred feet below me with his mouth open, just like in Jaws, so that I would have a good three seconds to scream out bubbles before the water churned an angry red.

Of course, that didn’t happen. I plopped into the water and sixty feet below me, there was some sand and murkiness—but just behind me, circling the boat’s props, were big schools of fish as long as my arm, and a few feet in front was an incredible Pixar-bright world: sea turtles; giant clams as long as my BODY in neon green or purple or pink, photo-sensitive so that if you dove down and waved your hand in front of them, they slammed their shell shut; and schools and schools and schools of Nemos and big slow blue groupers and Nemo’s friend Gill, the angelfish, although they were really shy; and green parrotfish with nasty-looking beaks, and blue-spotted manta rays and long yellow trumpetfish and every other fish you have ever seen photos of, real and live and right there in front of us, darting in and out of the coral. I had one or two lifetime experiences: slowly flanking a sea turtle, who merely glanced at me once sideways and then kept swimming along on his graceful, gradual way; diving down into a deep trench and coming face-to-face with a shy fish almost exactly as big as me, camouflaged brown with long waving tendrils of fins, who as soon as I saw him ducked down further into the trench where I couldn’t follow; coming to the edge of the shallow piece of reef and seeing, maybe sixty feet across the fading blue, a brain coral about two stories high (Mom and I didn’t quite dare swim out to it). I was incredibly relieved to have not seen any sharks, not even the allegedly harmless small reef sharks.

It was incredible. The boat dropped us at two other sites, and by the end of the day, we were so gloriously happy. We felt we had seen everything. We returned to Cairns and met Dad, who had also had a great day exploring the museums of Cairns and checking out the wildlife, and we had dinner at the same Greek pizza place.