We had sailed out about twenty miles off shore to a dive site where there was a shipwreck and some sunken APCs so I think ahhh, that’ll be nice.  Well you can’t really call them sunken APCs because APCs wouldn’t really float in the first place so they’re just APCs that the army doesn’t want anymore.  Now, for you folk that are not really military-lingo-savvy, the abbreviation APC stands for Armoured Personnel Carrier.  By the way, why is ‘Abbreviation’ such a long word anyway.  Of course on March 28^th you can expect the weather to be quite nice and it was, there was sun and blue skies, and no wind to speak of, and the seas were calm.  Hah, naïve Australian!  I put on all the Scuba gear, single layer wetsuit, which is more than enough in Aussie waters, and I didn’t have gloves, I never wear them in Australia either.  Duh. 

Wrong!!  The water was freezing cold, no sooner had I jumped in than my hands began to develop frostbite, ouch!  My goodness, talk about brass monkeys* needing welders, a case-hardened steel monkey wouldn’t last long in that water.

I whirled around and climbed back onto the boat and borrowed a pair of gloves from  one of the American divers, whose Asthma was playing up so he wasn’t diving.  I also put on another wetsuit, over the one I already had on.  Okay, back in business again, I scissor-jumped into the Atlantic again, ready to look at discarded military hardware, like, as if it’s not easier to see above ground!

I hadn’t realised how great we have it in Aussie waters.  When I dove around Lady Redcliffe and Moreton island we could see at least 10 metres, and Lady Musgrave Island on the Barrier Reef had about 30 meters visibility under the water.  Here, I had to descend by holding onto a rope that was secured to the wrecks, and once under the water, the visibility was an eye opening 1 foot, you could hardly see your hand in front of your face.  So much for the site-seeing of the wrecks:).  I tried fruitlessly to have a see around but eventually I just gave up and surfaced and climbed back into the boat.  Of course the intense cold had much to do with my curtailing the frivolity under water.  The dive master explained that the water was particularly murky because of all the rain we’ve had, so maybe y’all can try it again in a few weeks time, but he didn’t offer us a refund or anything. 

So dejected that I couldn’t see anything and I’d spent good money making the trip.  As a linguist, and a cunning one at that, I got to thinking, maybe too much, why do we say ‘good’ money?  Fathers say, “That dang thing cost me some good money boy, so you better look after it.”  Does anyone say, “Oh I bought that with bad money, so I don’t care if you break it.”  I came home to Lumberton, filled out my dive log booklet and contented myself above ground for a while.  I did manage to take some photos though,  I’d bought a new memory stick for my camera, a 256 mb one, and I took about 200 mb of digital film which are just some snippets of the trip on board.  Even if I had an underwater camera, it wouldn’t have been able to photograph anything.  Little River is a nice holiday spot though, there’s a little river there, quaint motels, good pubs and restaurants, I’ll return when the water is clearer.