They found the jacket of one of the two americans some scuba company left at sea. The jacket needed to be removed manually and showed no teethmarks or any such lethal attitudes. Rumor now floats around that mr. American didn't like his home nation (?! :) and planned this vanishing act...
I personally preferred the calm boat ride home from my 3-day, 9-dive live-aboard to the 30km swim to the coast.
We had an underwater sign I think appropriate. Face both palms forward, fingers spread, and make a circle touching forefingers and thumbs. Spells 'wow'.
Let's forget for a moment the important location off the ozzie coast, and examine just the process and the water. 18m down, hovering mid-fluid. Bubbles rise and merge for the long trip to the surface, forming streamlined discs like mercuric chocolate nonpareils trailing a comet tail of sparkling crystal sugar spheres. A quick burst of air sends a wobbling torus to the surface: superstring studies, anyone? Total leisure to ponder the shimmering water-air interface, the 2D lifeline, a reassuring lifesurface quickly forgotten in the alien world we are enabled to explore for an all-too-short hour of disciplined breathing. It is flying, that gift for which I have always yearned.
After 4 certifying dives we are freed to explore in buddy pairs. Shall I approximate? Such poor justice, even with my yet unseen photographic documentation!
The Great Barrier Reef is a city like none we have yet built: it is the only living structure visible from the moon. Thus is it rich on the grandest scale, but the richness only expands as we let the reef expand in our silicone goggles (whose ill fit to my ample nose is instantly forgotten). Midrange human-scale structures exhibit canyons, pits, ledges, tables, tunnels, mines, steam tunnels... The reef is a gigantic skeleton of tiny animals growing new bone and living on layers of past generation's backbone. Boulders, antlers, fingers, flowers, plates, fans, trees, whips; red, blue, green, and all combinations thereof; soft, hard, flexible, brittle; rough, smooth, fractal, periodic; reactive, passive: all living off the tiny plants photosynthesizing witin their flesh, with whom they barter nutrients and residence. The fish love this animal forest and live within its pocketed, layered surface. Naming just the broad families is daunting: cigar-like wrasse, frisbee-shaped surgeonfish with the spike by the gill, butterfly fish, angelfish, classically fishlike damselfish, triggerfish with their defensive triggered crest spike, multicolored parrotfish whose fused teeth audibly snap morsels of coral and who nightly sneeze a transparent mucus bag in which they sleep hiding from sophisticated heat sensors and sonar, curious moray eel, pole-shaped flute-mouths, stonefish freeze, thinking themselves (usually accurately) camoflaged, microfish and macrofish adapted to the diverse skeletal coral formations; turtles are friendly enough to touch if you are slow, sharks are less approachable but dramatic, octopii gingerly, curiously emerge to examine the metal-laden intruders, shrimp glow with a natural orange cyalume, sting rays flap over the occasional sandy bottom, sea stars (formerly known ineptly as starfish) creep and the lethal crown-of-thorns sea star creeps ominously, sea cucumbers bum along the bottom filtering sand and leaving a processed trail of sandy poo (the black ones breathe through their anus and when threatened fart their fibrous netted white lungs around the enemy), giant clams burrow into boulder coral and grow too fleshy to even to close, gobies poke their vivid christmas-tree heads from tinier holes and retract in a blink with a wave of the hand. With typical visibility of 25m we get a color bouquet bluing into the distance. We have three different colors of light-transducing pigments; shrimp have ten, with good reason down there. I wish for that level of discrimination: O the subtlties we miss! I suggest replacing the elementary school recess yard with a far superioa submerged reef playground-perhaps it'd be good practice for our descendents driven back to the original Mother by terranean overpopulation.
I now long for more time in the sea.
Bubbly,
-xaq