Shipwreck! Scuba Diving the SS Yongala

Until today, I'd been in Australia for 3 weeks, and still hadn't done any scuba diving. This was strange, because scub diving was one of the things which drew me to Australia in the first place! As I imagine you've already guessed (you're so smart!), my no-scuba streak changed today when I did a dive of the SS Yongala, a famous shipwreck from 1911 which is considered to be one of the top dives in the world.

My adventure began the day before, when I got the OzExperience bus driver to drop me off at the pool in Ayr, Australia. There I met up with an instructor from Yongala Dive, and hopped into a pool to do a quick scuba refresher. It had been a year since my last dive (when I got Open Water certified in Honduras), so I wanted to make sure I remembered everything, rather than discover that I'd forgotten how to retrieve my regulator when I was 25 meters under water. The course went well - turns out I hadn't really forgotten anything, but still nice to know before doing the real thing. I went back to the Yongala Dive Shop, went for a quick run on the beach (where I had flashbacks from Central America when I was chased by several dogs), then chilled out for the evening.

The next morning was the big day - time for the dive! I got up bright and early, and was down in the dive shop at 7am. After a safety briefing where I signed a release which basically said I wouldn't sue the dive shop even if they took out a gun and shot me (hey lawyer friends, are documents like that really legit?), we headed out onto the water. Unfortunately, as I already discovered during my Whitsunday Islands sailing trip (blog post on that to come), the weather gods have not been looking kindly on me recently, and the seas were rather choppy. After 45 minutes on the ocean roller coaster, I was a nice shade of green, but ready for the dive!

And wow, what a dive. As our instructor explained, the SS Yongala sank in the sand (not the reef), so it is basically an oasis in the desert, and marine life just flocks to it. The sheer volume of fish was amazing! Over the course of my 2 dives I saw 3 moray eels, 2 turtles, and an eagle ray! I also saw an entire school of barracudas, and countless other fish. There were actually so many fish in and around the wreck that it was hard to look in and see some of the features within the boat. I had never done a wreck dive before, but loved it. Hopefully I'll be able to do several more on my trip. And if I'm lucky, maybe I'll even be able to swim into some of the wrecks (it's illegal to swim into the Yongala).

Anyways, I definitely had a blast on the trip. In about a week I'll be starting a 3-day live-aboard scuba dive boat trip on the great barrier reef where I'll get my PADI Advanced certification. This dive certainly got me looking forward to that!

Well, I didn't bring a camera, but I wouldn't let some minor detail like that stop me from getting some pictures from my blog. Here are some images courtesy of Google. Enjoy!

postcard of the Yongala (before it sank, clearly)

A map of the Yongala wreck

this is exactly what I experienced in my dive. Fish everywhere!!

another good example of the views I had

a good view of the wreck from a distance

in case the pictures don't make it clear enough, there were fish EVERYWHERE!