Captain's Log: Final Entry

So, this is it.

I leave tomorrow morning for New Zealand. This is the last post from Australia. Everything's packed except for the computer, and that's going away after I finish this.

It has been an amazing semester. A few important things to say; I'm going to miss the people i've gotten to know here much more than i thought even a week ago. Also, i definitely learned more about myself in these past 4 months than anything else. Sure classes were great, and I can follow the financial reports on the news now, but living on my own in a totally new city without knowing anyone has provided greater lessons than can be achieved in any classroom/lecture hall.

This is a picture of me from the diving trip, getting out of the water, and is quite how I feel. While I have had an amazing time down under, It's going to be very nice to breath easy again, at home.

Fish Rock Cave

Last weekend, we were finally able to go diving at Fish Rock Cave, and it was spectacular. Saturday was very stormy, the 40 minute boat ride out to the cave got a bit rough at times, but it was perfectly calm underneath the water. We dove twice on Saturday and twice on Sunday, the weather was a lot better on Sunday though, which really helped the visibility underwater.
They were the deepest dives i've ever done, a little over 30m (about 100 feet), we had to do decompression stops on the way up. That deep down, it truly feels like another world.

At Fish Rock, there are two dive sites, the cave itself, and the shark gutters. We did the shark gutters first both days, and that was both very scary and beautiful. Basically, at about 32m, there is this long corridor of sand with two 'walls' (more like what a riverbank would look like) running down the sides. The sharks (big, 6-7 foot grey nurse sharks) would just cruise down the center of the corridor. Basically, we'd descend down one of the sides of the gutter, and then so long as we didn't make much noise, the sharks would come right up to us, at some points i could count 7 or 8 swimming around. Luckily, the two guys I was diving with had cameras, so here's me with some sharks in the gutter.
This one shows just how many sharks we'd see come by in packs at a time, and how close we were


Here's one of me (in the distance a bit) just amazed and looking around, there were more sharks behind the big one.


After the shark gutters we dove through the cave, which was also, pretty scary and amazing. We started at the deep end of the cave (i suppose its more like a tunnel) which was about 25m deep. It was absolutely pitch black, we each had flashlights, and the tunnel was so narrow we could only go through one at a time, and at most times I couldn't have spread my arms out. We saw some really odd looking fish and crabs in the cave, the best part was that it opened up and out at the end, with a really big opening. From inside the cave, the light from outside created numerous silhouettes of all the fish and sharks in the opening of the cave, this is the best picture of it that we got.


And finally, I've got to include this one because it reminded me so much of Finding Nemo, we found a few sea turtles, and they really do look like they're just chilling, lazily swimming around. Plus, its one of the few clear pictures of me that one of them got.

Boo Stormwater

Unfortunately, that awesome scuba trip I was looking forward to so much was postponed. There were really heavy storms north of Sydney last week and all of the stormwater drained near the dive site, bring along a lot of sediment and dust and made the visibility less than 4 ft. The Dive shop realized it wasn't going to be worth going up at all, so they moved it to this weekend coming up, hopefully the weather will comply.

Classes are officially over, we're currently in StuVac (study vacation, kinda like reading day. but for a week) I get to dedicate this entire week to the study of Macroeconomics, a class i didn't need to take, but (rightfully) thought would still be useful, and it definitely was. It's just also not as straightforward as I had previously thought. After that is Political Economy, another one I thought would be useful (it was less useful than macro, but still really interesting), and then finally Critical Thinking, literally the day before I fly out of here. For Democratic Theory we only had a final paper, which I turned in last week.

The tree in the quad has finally bloomed, letting everyone know to start studying.


I also went to the beach over the weekend, and did a really nice walk down the coast. This is from one of the outcroppings of land.