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Hello everyone!
Hope you are all well and looking forward to xmas now!
Well we arrived in Exmouth hoping to do our PADI scuba diving course, but unfortunately we had miss timed our stay with the days they start the course. A little bit disappointed we decided a good substitute was to book onto a Naval Pier Dive for the Sunday which is suppose to be a top ten dive site in the world. Now we had 4 days in Exmouth to fill! Exmouth isn't very big and isn't even classed as a town, so to get around we hired out a scooter for 3 days to visit the local sights. Our first day, we took the scooter and hired out some snorkel gear and headed to Turquoise Bay which was about 65k away. It took us about an hour and a bit to get there, so you can well imagine our bums were a bit sore by the time we got there but we did get to see wild emus and kangaroos along the way, including one kangaroo who decided to jump across in front of us while we were at top speed (50km woo!). Luckily Gavin managed to brake and maneuver us around him but it was amazing to see just how big they are, and also easy to see how they get run over! At Turquoise Bay we were greeted by a million flies as we walked down to the white sandy beach and crystal clear waters. We went to the drift loop which means you walk to the end of the beach and then you let the currents drift you along over the fringe reef and then you get out at the sand bar before the current gets too strong. We saw some amazing reef fish around this part and lazed on the beach for a while.
Unfortunately Gavin hadn't been feeling very well with a sore throat for a while and a trip to the pharmacist meant he was sent to the doctor at the hospital where he was diagnosed with Tonsillitis & a wisdom tooth coming through. A course of antibiotics and no kissing for the next week seemed to help clear it.
With Gavin not feeling well and not much to do in Exmouth apart from dive, snorkel or swat flies, we were looking forward to our scuba dive Sunday. The morning of our dive we had to give back the scooter and hour before it was due back we turned our room upside down to find the key for it! Plus we had to check out that morning and it was gonna be tight between handing the bike back and getting our stuff out the room. After finally giving up looking for it Gavin headed down to the hire shop to confess we lost the key and feeling down about the cost we were going to incur. I headed back to the room for one last look and bumped into a guy we had shared the room with and he had found our key in the lounge the night before! Absolutely es tactic that he had found it, I jumped on the bike and chased after Gavin before he got to the shop. I saw him half way down the road and beeped the horn to get his attention. So relieved he rode it back to the shop with 5 mins to spare! We managed to check out half an hour late but the reception were good enough to give us the time without charge after we explained our situation.
So after that dilemma, we though the rest of day would go very smoothly! But we were wrong. At 1.30 p.m we were picked up to do our dive. At the briefing we had to fill in a medical declaration and Gavin told them he was on medication but the doctor said it would be OK to dive. Our diving Instructor, Kate explained that Gavin wouldn't be allowed to dive on antibiotics without a doctors note and that he would be entitled to a refund. We were both absolutely gutted as we had looked forward to this the whole week and wanted to share the experience. Kate did say she would get someone in the office to ring the hospital to check. Thankfully they got through to the nurse who saw Gavin and she backed up what she had told Gavin that he would be able to dive on his medication. So the dive was back on! Yeah! So we headed off to the pier to do the dive. We had to wait a while for the current to die down then we got kitted up. To get into the water we had to jump 2 meters of a platform from the pier which was probably the scariest part. But we both managed it and once in the water we felt really relaxed with Kate leading us around the pier. The highlights were seeing several white tip reef sharks along with blue spotted rays, an eel and lots of reef fish including a big shoal that were very inquisitive about us and seemed to follow us around. In all we managed a depth of 11m and were in the water for 50 minutes. An awesome experience.
We finished the day by catching the Greyhound bus too Monkey Mia.
Until our next installment!
Love Helen and Gavin x
P.S Hope you all have a good laugh at the before and after photos of Gavin getting his haircut!
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