The whale shark is definitely the biggest fish I’ve ever seen. We are in a place that looks like the Bay of Islands in Fiji. It is called Triton Bay and here we will dry out the boat. At high tide we parked in a little swimming pool sized offcut in the side of the island. In the morning (which is low tide) the boat is on the ground. My Dad wants to change the prop but it is still too deep.
Me and Lukie jump in, not realising that we should be doing home schooling, and when I touch the water my feet hit the bottom before my waist gets wet. After schooling I swim around and find a strange looking bit of seaweed. I poke it and it curls around my finger. Two eyes pop open then it dawns on me what it is.
A seahorse! I show it to Lukie who starts yelling for our Mum to come. “MUMMY!” “MUMMY!”
I put my head under the water to drown out the noise. The next morning we leave for Triton Bay Divers and we will probably go back to the shallow bay to dry out the boat in an even shallower place. Today we will go for a snorkel in a famous dive area, let’s see how it goes.
As soon as I leave the dinghy a soft coral-covered rock comes into view. Massive butterfly fish swim about, I could swim right down to them and snap a photo. I slowly let the current drag me along.
I swim around the rock and into a lion fish, spines raised and ready for attack. Lukie shows me a little orange starfish, then he tries to get me to follow him to more starfish, and I do.
Brittle star looking things that are called feather stars are curled up in balls, using their arms to catch plankton. Here really big jellyfish live, dark brown and see-through ones come across my path. I don’t go near them as they are 20cm long! That’s a big jelly.
I bump into a solid object in the water, but I can’t see it. I swim back to get a better look. It’s a massive, solid, see-through plankton. That’s really weird. Now I see a nudibranch. A nudibranch is a sea slug thing. This one was really cute and it had gills on its back! That’s like having your nose on your back, how strange is that?
On this snorkel I saw a lot of weird things. Next we went to a swim through, as soon as you got through you got swept away, around a rock and back where you started. Before I went through me and my Mum took photos of a big… hang on let me think… a pufferfish? Yeah, I think it was a spikeless pufferfish, anyway.
I swam through the swim through, the current quickly took me around, I did it again and again and again. Eventually I got cold, so just before I got out I swam down under a ledge to find a big fish to photo, and I found one, a big one.
A large shark swam around, with no tips on its fins. Instead of taking a photo I swam back up and climbed into the dinghy. We managed to stop Lukie doing another swim through, so we could leave.
Some days later we saw some very old cave paintings, they were super cool, I never knew that cave people could draw that well. It was good for back then, but its really not much better than what a three-year-old could do, no offence, Cave People!
SV Bob The Cat 