cairns baby! f'in cairns!!!!

i got into cairns a few days ago and then hopped on a boat to dive for 4 days at the barrier reef. and to keep my audience happy, the first thing i did when i got to cairns was to find some free internet access. and look at the name of the wireless lan at the bottom:


what's funny about that picture is that it had "2" at the end.... meaning that someone somewhere probably had the original name. i didn't spend time looking for it. sorry.... but i had a blast in cairns & met some really fun people. this was the best part of my trip so far. my advice to you, my loyal subscribers, is to skip sydney all together and just go straight to cairns! well, i supposed a day in sydney won't kill you.

anyway, onto the dive pictures. i meant to bring Mr Crabs down, but i just never did. sorry. maybe on my next dive. you'd think a crab would be anxious to get in the water, but he just wanted to hang out in my room all day. here are some dive pictures for ya:





me being my usual serious self:



this is probably my best do-it-yourself picture ever:


found this guy sleeping. we ended up chasing him around a bit. pretty smart, no? i just had the best group of people to dive with. sure made the trip that much better. eddie kicked ass.


on the 2nd night, everyone was really beat. i almost fell asleep at 9pm. it was supposed to be a mellow evening. "just one beer." but then we managed to somehow stay awake until the bar closed. and what do you know? we opened the bar for ourselves! as you can see, i'm not very good at pouring beer: (but this was after quite a few beers...)


i kinda thought we might get in a little trouble for opening the bar, but then i realized that we were drinking with the skipper of the boat. just b/c he's passed out here doesn't mean we should close the bar, does it?


the skipper also instigated "suicide" shots. you snort salt, squirt lime in your eyes and then do a shot of tequila. austrailians are really crazy. seriously. since eddie represented the USA, i didn't have to do a suicide shot. pictured here is jordan doing a fine job of representing canda, eh?


all of us were eventually out done by "rob the chef" who snorted cheyanne (sp?) pepper instead of salt. he also opened his eye really wide and put tons of lime juice in it. later that night, he apparently got naked and ran into some of the crews rooms. and yes, he was the boat's chef. this night got really ugly. remembering what happened last time i stayed awake too long, i decided to go to bed @ 5:30AM. we were jumping off the top deck of the boat, some people went for a drunken night dive and general disarray was left where ever we went. the funny part about this night was that the group actually got larger as the night progressed. i guess our noise was waking people up. rob the chef woke up @ 1am to get a snack and immediately caught up w/ our drunken state. the camera guy (dave) did the same around 2am. we had an absolutely great time. and epic night for the books.

here's a quick video for ya.

i'll be in townsville (magnetic island actually) and will be doing the SS yongala dive tomorrow (pose to be the best dive in oz) and then i'm off to mackay to sail around whitsundays. i'm not sure about the 'net access at any of these places, so i'll update the blog when i can.

cairns baby!!!! f'in cairns!!!!!

miss you all! and congrats to the dball team for opening a can of....