Spunky Abe, me and our new best friend, a huge Potato Cod at Osprey Reef – Photo courtesy of Max @ Mike Ball Expeditions

Dear Critters,

I am excited to share a few photos with you in this post from my most recent trip on Thurs Sept 25 – Mon Sept 29, 2014 (exciting video including shark feeding, mating sea snakes, turtles and more will be posted separately :-) )

After three landlocked weekends, I have just returned from my first ever live-aboard dive adventure to the outer Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea on the Mike Ball Expeditions vessel, Spoilsport.

My first ever introductory dive was about twelve years ago on the Reef, and I was super-excited to return to this amazing part of the ocean with Spunky Abe and our dive buddies, LP and Julie Bear.

Somehow, I managed to rise above 24 hours of chronic seasickness and a migraine between my first and second dives to complete twelve dives and to completely fall in love with the amazing Coral Sea, north of Cairns at the top end of Australia.This trip included travelling 1500 kms by sea over 4 nights aboard the Spoilsport and three full days of diving.

Here’s a fantastic video my best buddy LP took during this amazing underwater vacation (if you watch carefully, you’ll see me hanging out with barracudas at 0:52 and a big bunch of sharks at 1:30 – enjoy!)

Dive sites visited included Challenger Bay, Cod Hole, False Entrance, Snake Pit, West Horn, Fairy Grotto and several others.There were amazing fish, corals and sharks on every dive, and some dives featured turtles, sea snakes, moray eels and more.

Photo courtesy of Julie Jones

One of many very chilled out white tip reef sharks.

Me being goofy as always – photo courtesy of Bob Halstead

A parrot fish in its cocoon at night.

One of the highlights was definitely the amazing shark feed dive! I love these photos of me photographing sharks by Julie Jones and Bob Halstead (make sure you check out Bob’s amazing new Coral Sea Fish Guide App on the iTunes store!)

Me playing with beautiful sharkies (seriously, can you count them all???) – awesome photo courtesy of Julie Jones

That’s me in the middle with the pink fins and the light on my camera – photo courtesy of Bob Halstead

Make sure you check out my next post where I will share some insane footage of the shark feeding experience. Call me crazy, but the highlight for me was when one shark accidentally bumped into my leg and almost sent me flying right off my coral perch less than 3 metres from the shark feeding platform!

At the end of our adventure, we disembarked at Lizard Island, where we caught a low flying Cessna over the spectacular Great Barrier Reef, the first of three flights for the day to get home to Melbourne.

Spunky Abe waiting to board our teeny, tiny airplane for a low altitude flight over the Great Barrier Reef.

It really meant a lot to me to do this trip straight after my retirement from my job with the blessing of my oncologist. After arriving home in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, I presented at the hospital for palliative radiation sessions 5 and 6 on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. I am truly tired but perpetually buoyed by my bliss.

Life is for living and the ocean is for exploring. This is my bliss and I can’t wait to share my videos from this trip with you in my next post. Maybe one day you might even find your own way to share the ocean with me?

Love and bubbles,

PT xxx

ps While you’re here, please feel to check out more of my underwater images and photos from my other recent dive adventures!

Andrew Schulze from London meets our favourite Flinders Octopus

Dear Critters,

Please scroll down for an amazing video of our octopus encounter yesterday at Flinders Pier (taken by my awesome dive buddy, Mark ‘LP’ Jones – and check out more of his sensational underwater videography at http://www.oceanandtheearth.wordpress.com).

One of the highlights of any dive holiday is making new friends. After meeting South African Londoner Andrew Schulze on last week’s Great Barrier Reef Trip, LP and I were more than happy to introduce him to the awesome critters of Flinders Pier during his visit to Melbourne yesterday.

Shortly after entering the water, I squealed with delight to recognise two familiar but well-camoflauged eyes peering straight at me from one of the pylons not far from shore. Somehow I managed to yell loud enough underwater to call LP and Andrew back to the extraordinary creature they had unknowingly just swum past.

It was such a magical pleasure to swim with this beautiful creature, before heading to the far end of the pier to find Andrew his first ever weedy sea dragons (in addition to finding a drowned iPhone and what appeared to be a life-sized plaster cast of a whale bone!)

What a wonderful way to conclude one of the most memorable weeks of my life (videoing a frenzied shark feed at very close range in the Coral Sea, flying over the Great Barrier Reef, a helicopter ride, a personal get well card from my childhood pop idol Cliff Richard, an interstate visit from my precious god-daughter and more). Yes, there were also 4 more radiation sessions in this week’s mix, but I am pleased to report that all went smoothly and that I believe I am travelling better at this stage than many would expect.

I am steadily learning one of the sweetest life lessons on the menu. Life is for living, and when we take the opportunities presented to us to live it fully, the challenges we face can fade to insignificance, or at the very least, fall into some sort of welcome perspective.

My name is PT. According to my oncologist, I have a terminal illness. According to me, I am fully, vibrantly, gratefully alive and have never felt more blissed and blessed in all my entire life.

Love and bubbles,

PT xxx

ps Tank you so much for visiting my blog!  While you are here, please check out some more of my underwater photos and videos, and don’t forget to like Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook!

pps I know, I know … I’ll aim to work on my Great Barrier Reef / Coral Sea video sometime this week – hopefully, it will be worth the wait :-) :-) :-)

Dear Critters,

Many people ask me ‘Aren’t you afraid of sharks?’, and as a girl who has had cancer four times in four years and who recently has been told that her condition is terminal, I have to admit that I’m honestly not really afraid of very much of all.

Call me crazy, but the closer I can get to sharks, the happier I am. When one accidentally knocked against my leg during this encounter at Osprey Reef in the Coral Sea and almost sent me flying from my coral perch 3 metres away from the feeding platform, that was pretty close to the highlight of my life. (At this point, I must offer a heartfelt thanks to my new friend Bob Halstead who kindly directed me to an incredibly up close and personal vantage point for this Bucket List dive :-) )

For me, the best thing about diving on the outer Great Barrier Reef and further north into the Coral Sea is the opportunity to swim with reef sharks on virtually every dive. I’ve dived with sharks many times before, including the world-famous bull shark feeding dive at Beqa (pronouced ‘Benga’) in Fiji – my video from that dive is also on this blog for your viewing pleasure, under the ‘Videos’ tab :-) Personally, I preferred the intimacy of the shark feeding experience at Osprey Reef.

I appreciate that the practice of shark feeding is not without controversy, but I believe that both of the experiences I’ve had have been highly respectful of the needs and natural instincts of the sharks. In particular, only a very small amount of food is used to attract the sharks in the Coral Sea.

You might expect close encounters with a shark (or closer to fifty, like shown in this video) to make the heart race in a rush of adrenalin. Mine doesn’t. My breathing slows as my bliss descends. I find that I am truly in my element.

Despite their fearful, Spielberg-inspired reputation, most sharks are extremely timid and will shy away from people underwater. Occasionally swimmers and surfers (who resemble turtles from underneath) might be mistaken for a legitimate food source by a hungry shark that is simply following its predatory instincts as an apex predator in its own natural environment.

In terms of worldwide fatalities, falling coconuts are responsible for around 150 deaths annually, champagne corks kill 24 people each year, almost 6,000 people die from tripping and falling in their homes. Similarly, cows, bees, horses, vending machines, ladders, ants and dogs are all responsible for far more deaths each year than sharks.

One of many very chilled out white tip reef sharks.

On average, there are fewer than 5 shark related human fatalities worldwide each year. By contrast, it is estimated that more than 100 million sharks are slaughtered by humans every year as a result of fishing and misguided culling programs that ultimately do nothing to enhance human safety. As with everything in this world, a little bit of education provides a lot of much needed perspective.

Each time I enter the ocean to spend time with the creatures who live there, I am a visitor in their world and I take a calculated risk. Am I scared that a shark might eat me? No. My oncologist said I am likely to die within 5-11 months from advanced, recurrent, metastatic endometrial cancer. He was 100% certain about this (though in my optimism, I am less certain). He said absolutely nothing about sharks. Now where are those Great Whites so I can cross another item off my big old Bucket List? :-P

Love and bubbles,

PT xxx

ps Tank you for taking the time to visit my blog! Please check out some more of my ‘Scuba versus Tumour’ underwater adventures while you are here. And don’t forget to like Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook!

pps More Great Barrier Reef / Coral Sea videos to come over the coming week or so – stay tuned!

ppps Apologies to my beloved dad Kirby for this video. He really doesn’t like me playing with sharks (in fact, he sells Shark Repellant in his Survival Supplies store!) I didn’t tell him about this part of my trip until I came home as I already give the poor darling enough to worry about. As I write this, he is getting the plaster cast off the wrist he broke the day I dived with the sea lions (that’s a really good video to watch if you haven’t seen it already!) Love you, Kirbs xxxxx

Dear Critters,

Is every dive extraordinary? No. And yes. This question is like asking, is every day extraordinary? Or is every breath extraordinary? Of course they are.

Some days and dives and breaths are more memorable than others, for reasons both bad and good. But a dive is a dive. And a day is a day. And a breath is a breath. And all are limited in number, whether we have been forced to live daily with this knowledge or not. Every dive and breath and day – no matter how ordinary or challenging or underwhelming –  is a precious and extraordinary blessing that should never be taken for granted.

I have always said that, for me, one minute underwater beats a year on land (which I suppose is a bold and bizarre statement from someone who has been told they have less than a year to live). By this definition, yesterday’s tiny dive at Flinders Pier (which was unexpectedly shorter than the time it took to assemble our gear and get into the water) was still better than 20 years on land.

Extraordinary. Even though I didn’t have my beloved camera which is currently being repaired. Even though the camera I had borrowed didn’t contain a charged battery.(Thankfully, my best buddy LP got a few brief snippets of footage for us to share – please check out his excellent blog at http://www.oceanandtheearth.wordpress.com  :-)

Even though the sun didn’t start to shine until just before we were forced to abort the dive prematurely due to a technical issue with an expensive piece of gear …

Even though we didn’t get to see any draughtboard sharks or cuttlefish or massive stingrays or octopuses …

As always at Flinders, we managed to spend a little time with the resident weedy seadragons, including males carrying hundreds of pink eggs along their tails (see attached photos from 2012), and a few that had sadly lost their tails altogether to crabs or fish that were hungry for those eggs.

Yet despite their disability, those stumpy little, tail-less dragons continued their lives as usual. Losing a tail is not the same as being devoured whole. Even without a tail (and in my case, living with a diagnosis of terminal cancer), every moment of  life is a gift to be lived, rather than lamented.

This dive was extremely short (just 20 minutes as opposed to our more usual underwater play-time of more than 100), but gliding through the underwater world is always sweet. None of us ever know how many days or dives or breaths we may have left. This makes each one extraordinary and a blessing to be celebrated.

Love and bubbles,

PT xxx

PS Tanks so much for taking the time to visit my blog! :-) While you are here, feel free to check out more videos and photos from some of my other underwater adventures … and don’t forget to like Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook!

PPS Stay tuned for more videos from my recent trip to the outer Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea – coming soon! :-D

Dear Critters,

Last weekend, my best buddy LP caught this extraordinary footage of the resident draughtboard (aka swell) shark of Flinders Pier, playing with a bottle and hunting for fish:

Nothing like the Spielberg-inspired shark of public misconception, we first encountered this sweet, timid creature a few months ago, a true and precious rarity under Melbourne’s piers. I was thrilled to take this humble footage during our first meeting:

Locating its position has become a genuine highlight of our dives at Flinders Pier. LP had one particularly close and special encounter a couple of weeks ago when the shark gently brushed its nose against his camera:

As is our ritual each Sunday, LP and I make our Critter Wishes as we drive to whichever pier we have elected to dive. Recently, we have chosen to have most of our underwater adventures at Flinders, in the hope of spending more magical underwater moments with our gentle new friend.

Yesterday, we meandered our way slowly beneath the pier from the shore, hoping to catch a treasured glimpse of the big orange octopus that we had come to know from previous dives. And in the deepest recesses of our hearts, we longed to see the beautiful draughtboard shark that had played with the bottle just one week earlier.

When I had watched LP’s video from his dive with Julie Bear the previous week, I had whispered a silent wish of safety for the sweet little shark who played so obliviously around the pylons of the pier with its many baited hooks and huge messes of tangled fishing line.

This week as I swam with a male weedy sea dragon carrying a long row of pink eggs along his tail, one of my long pink fins became hopelessly entangled in the unruly lines. The world beneath the pier is filled with hazards and threats from the often thoughtless and merciless World Above. I cut myself free with my dive knife before swimming back to where LP knelt waiting on the sandy ocean floor.

His eyes met mine with infinite sadness as he shook his head, positioning himself as though to block something from my view. ‘You mustn’t come this way,’ I heard him say in the way that divers talk with thoughts.’What I am trying to hide from you is something too, too terrible and sad for you to see.’

But I needed to know for myself what had happened, and finally I saw what I had entered the water, hoping to find. The beautiful, big blue eyes of our little friend. Staring vacantly into the open water from its sweet, severed head. The long, smooth body lost to the knife of some fisherman filled with elation at the tugging of his line, his satisfaction growing with each desperate thrash of a catch much larger than the whiting he’d anticipated. ‘Here is my prize,’ he declared to himself, before cutting off its precious head in triumph and tossing it with the creature’s guts back under the pier as though it were all nothing but trash.

My Friend. I will miss sharing the ocean with you and the presence of your gentle spirit nestled into the bed of weeds each time I enter waters that should have kept you safe from lines, hooks and knives. It is true that death comes for us all, but I had deeply wished a more natural, less violent end for you.

Your death reminds me that mine is inevitable (a statement of truth, irrespective of my current prognosis with terminal cancer). In the shadow of that inevitability, I am flooded with certainty that every moment of every life should be revered and lived fully. Like you, I will be here yesterday and gone tomorrow. But it is how I live, not how or when I die, that gives my life its value and meaning.

I share this story as a tribute to your life. But I am also compelled to tell your tale to combat the ignorance of human predators who, in understanding what your life was like, may come to a new perspective about its value. I pray they might start to consider that a life such as yours is worth more than the  thrill of the kill or the momentary taste of your flesh in their mouths.And I pray that our friend the octopus whom we could not find is hiding somewhere safe from human harm .

Pretty Little Shark, in  my eyes, you are precious beyond measure. I shall miss you, dear friend, and every dive will be in honour of your memory.

Eternal bubbles of restful peace,

PT xxx

ps Tank you, Friends, for reading this melancholy post. While you are here, please check out some of my more blissful underwater adventures, and don’t forget to like Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook :-)

pps Please don’t forget to visit my dive buddy Mark ‘LP’ Jones’ amazing blog http://www.oceanandtheearth.wordpress.com to see more of his extraordinary underwater videos. And don’t forget to like Ocean and the Earth on Facebook :-) :-)

pps My long awaited Coral Sea video is now in productions and coming soon – watch this space! :-) :-) :-)

pppps The following video is a tribute of my Adrian for his best friend Gerry:

Dear Critters,

What do you fear? I’m not sure what I fear anymore. When people describe me as fearless, I have to think very hard of reasons why they might be wrong. Remember that old saying ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?’ Well after having cancer four times in four years (along with a bunch of major surgeries and my oncologist recently handing me a death sentence), I have been forced to confront my own mortality on many occasions. As a result, I must confess that fear no longer plays the role in my life that it once did. I think this image sums me up pretty well:

I know that many people fear snakes (and that my dear friend Mini will no doubt choose not to read this post!) I ceased to be fearful of them the first time I petted one under controlled conditions (though I am as always conflicted by the idea of any wild creature being kept in captivity).

That said, I have been completely fascinated by sea snakes in particular since first diving with banded sea snakes in the Philippines in 2012.

One of the dive sites on my recent underwater expedition to the Outer Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea was Snake Pit, half way between Lizard Island and Ribbon Reef.

This was truly one of the most critter rich sites of the trip, featuring reef sharks, large turtles, potato cod, schools of barracudas, a massive moray eel and more (which will all feature in the next video I post).

But for me the highlight of this dive was getting to swim with the beautiful olive sea snakes after whom ‘The Pit’ is named. No-one could accuse these snakes of being shy; they love to get up-close-and-personal with any camera lens to admire their own gorgeous reflection. Even more exciting was the rare opportunity to witness and film their graceful mating dance!

After we returned to the surface, Abe told me that after I went on to film the moray eel hiding under a rock ledge, the amorous snakes continued their elegant mating dance, wrapping themselves around and between my fins (further evidence that I must somehow convince him to also dive with a camera! :-P )

I am not suggesting that snakes are harmless (nor would I make such a suggestion about sharks that I adore diving with). Olive sea snakes are in fact highly venomous, just as the venom of many land snakes can be deadly. However, these snakes are known to be very docile. As with most marine creatures (such as blue ringed octopuses), they are extremely unlikely to cause any harm unless put in a position where they must defend themselves.

When we enter their world, we must do so with awe, wonder and the deepest respect. We know and accept the associated risks but do all we can to mitigate them by exercising a healthy measure of caution.

While I will be super-excited to show you my next video of huge fish schools, turtles and more, sharing this beautiful olive sea snake mating dance with you brings a wide smile to my face and bountiful bliss to my heart.

May joy and peace be yours today, and may all of your fears dissolve and may courage, hope and awe-inspired wonder take their place.

Love and bubbles,

PT xxx

ps Tank you so much for taking the time to visit my blog. While you’re here, please check out a few more of my underwater adventures … and don’t forget to like Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook! :-)

pps Stay tuned for my next video post, featuring other critters and dive sites from the outer Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea – coming soon!

Dear Critters,

It has taken me over a week to write this post. After my buddy discovered yet another massacred and mutilated draughtboard shark, I honestly just really didn’t feel up to writing. My buddy Mark ‘LP’ Jones has posted a video of his disturbing find and offered his personal reflections on his excellent blog http://www.oceanandtheearth.wordpress.com to raise awareness. But though he showed me where he had buried the wretched carcass with its monstrous gaping jaw underwater, I can never bring myself to watch his video, confronted by the grotesque details of gross human entitlement.

I find myself lost for words, numbed by yet another example of ignorance and gross inhumanity. Anyone who would commit such callous acts of violence against an animal (or as my father rightly pointed out, against another human being) in my opinion has elected to disconnect entirely from their own soul.

Instead, I choose to share this short clip LP filmed of me with a beautiful male weedy sea dragon with the full length of its tail covered with gorgeous pink eggs, along with this photo that I took in 2012:

This juxtaposition of impending new life against the tragedy of most unnatural death once again compels me to evaluate my own current prognosis of terminal illness. In my situation, do I choose to obsess about premature end of life or focus on the fact that life is for living fully? As always, I choose life. For as long as I live, I hope that I will be able to share the wonders of the underwater world that will outlive us all with others who might learn to love and cherish it as I do now.

This week I will commence my next round of palliative radiation. Once I am finished, I will board a plane in the hopes of crossing swimming with manta rays off my Bucket List. I cannot wait to share that amazing underwater adventure with you.

Love and bubbles,

PT xxx

ps Tank you so much for taking the time to read this post. While you are here, please take the time to enjoy some of my other underwater adventures … and don’t forget to like Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook! :-) :-) :-)

Dear Critters,

Lately I’ve been having lots of Bucket List dive adventures. (According to my oncology team, there’s not a whole lot of time left in my bucket, so I’ve been jumping on as many planes and boats as possible under doctor’s orders to make the most of whatever time is mine left to spend.) In the last month and a half, I’ve been 1500 kms past Cairns to the outer Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea with a small group of dive buddies to play with reef sharks, giant potato cod, olive sea snakes and more. Last week I spent four days on Stradbroke Island with Spunky Abe filming the majestic manta rays. And earlier this week I returned from a solo three day cage diving expedition with one of the biggest critters on most divers’ Bucket Lists, the Great White sharks of Australia’s Neptune Islands.

I suppose that with all these vacations anyone could be forgiven for thinking that I have a near-perfect life, and I am the first to admit that I truly feel deeply blessed to be able to have so many amazing experiences. (If there are any downsides to having so many back-to-back adventures, it is the fact that I suffer from chronic seasickness every minute that I am on a boat, combined with the fact that I am now at least three films behind in terms of what I should have posted by now.  I promise that I am working hard to edit and upload those films for your viewing pleasure now that I am reluctantly but temporarily between dive trips :-) )

In my travels, I love meeting new people, and often when I talk to them about my Pink Tank Scuba blog, they ask me ‘Is that what you do for a living?’ It’s a strange and loaded question. What they really mean is ‘Is this how you make money?’, as though somehow money is the currency by which all human activity must be measured and validated. While I would love my dive trips to be sponsored, alas at this stage I pay for all of these adventures myself. When I tell people ‘I’m retired’, they always look at me strangely and reply ‘But you’re too young to be retired’ and of course they are absolutely right.

I try to put off telling strangers that I no longer work due to terminal illness for as long as possible so that they have an opportunity to get to know me before they have the chance to pity or pigeon-hole me. Often, they have no idea that I have been diagnosed with advanced, late stage cancer until well after we’ve parted ways and they discover the truth via my blog or Facebook page. When they first meet me in person, they cannot see past the bliss on my face or the passion in my voice to the tumours that lie beneath the surface as I prattle on about my endless love for the ocean and all the beautiful creatures that inhabit it. Despite the fact that I have now completed palliative radiation, because I chose scuba therapy over chemotherapy, I simply just don’t look sick the way many cancer patients do.

So to answer their question: do I dive and keep my ‘scuba versus tumour’ blog for ‘a living’? ‘No’, I reply, ‘I do it for living’. Being submersed in the depths of the ocean is the only place that I ever feel truly alive. Someone told me recently that time spent underwater is not counted against the time we have left on land, so it makes complete sense to me to spend as much time underwater as humanly possible.

As we travelled out to dive with the Great Whites, we stopped for a fun dive with some gorgeous Australian sea lions. Why do these creatures play in the water with such energy, delighting in every opportunity for submersion and interaction? Watching how they glide and twirl, I can only think that the answer is because it brings them the purest pleasure and joy. Only here can they escape the anchor of land where freedom is limited and movement is cumbersome. Surely the shore is a much safer place to be, as their greatest predator, the Great White Shark, lurks nearby in the salty depths. But in order to be truly alive, to be nourished and fed and lost in playful abandon, sea lions must enter the ocean fearlessly, fully embracing the shortness and fullness of life. This is something that I identify with strongly.

And yet I am as fascinated with the predator as I am with the potential prey. There is something deep within me that yearns to face what most people fear and to find majesty where others only see monster. Like death, the Great Whites are nightmarish leviathans in the minds of most, taking the shape of horrors too deep and dark to contemplate. But I have no fear. I have looked the unknowable creature directly in the blackness of its unfathomable eye and have found the truth of myself and the monstrous beast equally affirmed. To the depths of my core, I find myself even more in awe of life and less afraid of death than I have ever been before.

My most sincere, heartfelt thanks go to the legendary Andrew Fox from Rodney Fox Expeditions for leading me on this adventure of a lifetime, for capturing every one of the incredible images in this post and for allowing me to share them on my blog. (If you are interested in cage diving with Great White Sharks, Rodney Fox Shark Expeditions is the only adventure group in the world that can offer you an ‘ocean floor elevator’ for certified divers as well as a surface cage for non-divers – I cannot recommend them highly enough!) Here’s our selfie to mark the occasion:

And I reserve my very deepest thanks to all of my readers who graciously and fearlessly take this extraordinary journey with me through my blog. Every opportunity for me to share my images, videos and reflections with you truly means as much to me as my first-hand experience of these underwater adventures themselves. I continue to work on editing the films of my life-affirming encounters with Great Whites, manta rays, turtles, leopard sharks and more from the past month and a half, and I look forward to sharing them all with you as soon as I possibly can. Stay tuned!

Oceans of love and blissful bubbles,

PT xxx

ps Tank you so much for taking the time to read through this blog post. While you are here, please feel free to check out some more of my underwater films and images …

Pps Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog by email to be notified of future posts and to follow Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook!

Dear Critters,

What is on your Bucket List? Within the space of a week, I managed to cross the two biggest critters off mine: mixing with the magnificent manta rays at Stradbroke Island and playing peek-a-boo with a Great White Shark called Bubbles and his sharkey friends in the Neptune Islands, South Australia. (Even terminal illness has its silver linings :-) )

I’m not sure when I first became fascinated by sharks, but over the past few years I’ve been privileged to do some of the best shark dives in the world. In recent months, my biggest fear in life had been about sharks. While I loved the intimacy of reef sharks feeding just 3 metres from where I sat at Osprey Reef in the Coral Sea and close encounters with bull sharks, lemon sharks, nurse sharks and more at Beqa in Fiji, I had become completely petrified by the idea of some day lying on my death bed without having ever had a close encounter with a great white shark.

Usually I share my underwater adventures with Spunky Abe or LP, but being recently ‘retired’ due to my significant health challenges means that now I’m pretty much in a position to board a plane for a solo adventure at insanely short notice. In this instance, I flew home from mantas on Monday, hit the internet on Tuesday to look for an opportunity to dive with Great Whites, and flew to Port Lincoln on Friday to make it happen! On this trip, I was in excellent company, as can be seen above with fellow adventurer Chad and shark expert Andrew Fox, and with Predapix shark photographer extraordinaire Sam Cahir (photobombing me – holding the camera that underwater film maker Chris Selman kindly let me borrow after mine flooded *groan* – in Andrew’s photo below):

Despite being chronically seasick for the first forty eight hours of the expedition, Dives 290-295 (one with the sea lions, one surface cage dive and three ocean floor dives with the infamous great whites) reminded me of stories about women who forget their labour pains immediately after first laying eyes upon the tiny fingers of their newborn child. Every time I feel the endless rocking of a boat on the ocean’s constantly unsettled surface, I promise myself that I will never subject my body to such vile seasickness again. But one look into the face of some Gorgeous Big Ocean Critter and all bets are off. How could anyone resist those deep, dark eyes? Those dorsal fins? Those sharp rows of teeth? And within minutes of being back on dry land, I’m already scouring the world for my next underwater adventure.

Yes, I’m aware of the debates surrounding cage diving, but I would not at this stage of life risk whatever time I have remaining swimming in the open water with Great Whites. As I was editing this video today, I had documentaries from ‘Shark Week’ running constantly in the background. I was not at all surprised to learn that the Great Whites of New Zealand are considered to be more aggressive than elsewhere in the world. I can only think that cage diving in South Australia and South Africa facilitates some sort of controlled familiarity between the two species that allows both to benefit from mutual curiosity. I was privileged to film one shark having its tumour biopsied which I will share with you in a future post, and I am so encouraged that the adventure company I dived with demonstrates genuine concern and conducts valuable research in the interests of the sharks it helps eco-tourists to interact with.

Until recently, the next big creature encounter on my Bucket List was to pat a tiger, but the following video (posted on Facebook yesterday by my friend Debbie) has challenged my conscience and compelled me to cross this off my list without doing it at all:

Of all encounters that people can have with animals, at least in visiting the Great White Sharks, it is the human who briefly occupies the cage while the wild beast roams free in its natural environment. If we wish to see these magnificent creatures in the wild, cage diving is the only sensible way for most people to achieve this, and it is an experience that I would recommend for divers and non-divers alike. Whenever we enter the water, we accept the risks and we respect the creatures we meet in all their exquisite diversity and fierce majesty. For me, cage diving is the underwater equivalent of an African safari, and one that I feel enormously privileged to have taken.

Once again, my sincere thanks to Andrew Fox for every one of the incredible photos attached to this post, and for making it possible for me to come up-close-and-personal with these beautiful wild animals in their underwater world. For these and all sharks, I am in awe without fear, and my heart overflows with undying love and absolute respect.

Love and a great white shark named Bubbles,

PT xxx

ps Tanks so much for taking the time to read through this post. Please check out some more of the underwater adventures on my blog while you are here …

pps And don’t forget to follow Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook! :-D

Dear Critters,

My ears instantly pricked up when on my recent Great White Shark expedition, I heard shark expert Andrew Fox declare ‘I’m on the lookout for one of the sharks that has a large tumour growing on his chin. I’m going to try to biopsy it. I’ve been aiming to do this for two years now.’ Given that I often describe Pink Tank Scuba as my ‘Scuba versus Tumour’ blog, the possibility of encountering a great white shark with a prominent tumour and the chance to film one of the world’s most unique biopsies held particular interest for me.

‘Santa’ is the first (and possibly the only) great white shark ever to have been documented with a tumour (photos above used with permission of Sam Cahir, http://www.predapix.com). I was on this trip to cross cage diving with great whites off my Big Critter Bucket List due to my own terminal prognosis; I hoped with all my heart that we would be able to find Santa on this trip to try to help him and other sharks by learning more about his condition and whether his tumour was malignant or benign.

As with all wild animal encounters, there was no guarantee that Santa would show up at all. But I could feel the anticipation rise and the hope that this unique mission might be a success as the large shark with the unmistakable tumour beard appeared through the murky water. He started to swim in slow circles around the cage we were in, twenty metres below the ocean’s surface (photo above used with permission of Andrew Fox). Maintaining a slight distance, I wondered whether the shark would dare to move close enough to the cage for Andrew to get a clear shot at the tumour with more than his camera.

Finally, after endless distant circles towards the cage then away again, Santa drew very close, putting the goal of the dive literally within arm’s reach. Andrew maintained absolute focus and nerves of steel as he exchanged his camera for a harpoon and exited the cage, his biopsy gun perfectly poised. His aim was exceptional; Santa flinched only slightly before disappearing into the distance, a decent-sized tumour sample having been successfully procured.

I feared that the shark would not return after whatever sting or fright he may have felt as the biopsy sample was taken from his chin. And a small part of me feared that if he did come back, he might be incensed by the indignity of the diagnostic interaction – would he transform into Speilberg’s monster, intent on destroying the cage and those of us inside it? ‘I’ve been there many times myself’, I reflected as I saw the shark’s powerful tail propel him away from the biopsy gun into the silty distance. I had been diagnosed with malignant tumours no less than four times in the past four years, leading directly to this very Bucket List expedition. I could not refrain from feeling some sort of strange empathy with this majestic creature, its body ravaged by cells that refused to die. His body hosted tumours that one day well might claim its life, as mine have been predicted to do. The sample Andrew had just collected would reveal whether the tumour was malignant or benign and might somehow be used by marine scientists to help this and other sharks.

Crew member Laura with the tumour sample (photo: Andrew Fox)

When Santa reappeared through the silty mist, he bore no signs of resentment or malice. I wondered if he’d even registered the loss of the sample at all? Great whites are a far cry from the sadistic, fictitious movie monster that lurks in the murky depths of most people’s wildest imaginings. The ocean is their world – not ours – and when we enter their habitat there will inevitably be times when they mistake a surfer or swimmer for something that they would naturally eat, such as a turtle or a sea lion. Most evidence suggests that when such mistakes occur (wrongly termed ‘attacks’ by sensationalist media), the shark quickly rejects what they have wrongly tested with their teeth. Humans simply don’t have enough fat content to be natural prey for sharks. Some experts suggest that sharks simply don’t find the occasional, unplanned taste of people especially appealing which is why, with a small handful of devastating exceptions, most accidents involving sharks do not result in fatalities. As one shark expert recently pointed out, if sharks intended to hunt humans, more beach swimmers would be taken than not. In reality, incidents which are inevitably touted as ‘shark attacks’ are usually no more than the shark acting in self-defence, or an unfortunate case of mistaken identity.

When Santa disappeared then reappeared one final time with another great white in close proximity, they seemed as curious about the inhabitants of the metal cage as we were about them. I am deeply encouraged that human interest in these amazing creatures has a proven capacity to move beyond ill-founded fear and sensationalised revulsion. The commitment of Andrew Fox to securing a sample of Santa’s tumour for analysis speaks volumes about the level of respect, care, responsibility and understanding that humans must begin to develop in caring for our planet and all of its creatures, great and small. The time for us to abandon the ludicrous image of massive monsters maliciously prowling beaches to massacre unsuspecting men, women and children is long overdue. For all its time-tested, horror-infused entertainment value, Spielberg’s ‘Jaws’ is nothing but clever fiction.

It was my absolute privilege to dive with Andrew on this historically significant dive and to witness and film this world exclusive biopsy of a great white shark’s tumour. My thoughts and best wishes are with Santa, as they would be with any creature facing the impact of a tumour growing on or in their bodies. It is a condition I am all too well acquainted with. It will be very interesting to learn the results of this biopsy, and to see what human scientists and shark experts will do with the information acquired in relation to Santa specifically and for the benefit of the species as a whole.

Love and bubbles (and best wishes, Santa!),

PT xxx

ps Tanks so much for taking the time to read this post.While you are here, please feel free to check out some more of my ‘scuba versus tumour’ underwater adventures :-)

pps Please stay in touch with my future adventures by subscribing by email to this blog and following Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook! :-D

Dear Critters,

Yesterday morning, my dive buddies and I entered the waters of Flinders Pier at 10:30am, the precise moment at which my dear friend Ivy took her final breath on this earth after her long, incredibly brave and inspiring battle with cancer.

Ivy and I were first introduced by a mutual friend so that we might encourage each other on our journeys with cancer. We had a long phone conversation before I finally had the privilege of inviting Ivy and her amazing husband Chin to my home. As a gift, they brought me two aloe vera plants – known for their healing properties – which I have watered each day, always thinking of Ivy and whispering prayers of strength and support for her on her journey.

I have never known anyone who has fought this battle with such determination and courage as Ivy. She was one of the sweetest, strongest, most positive, tenacious and real people I have ever known. Ivy never gave up hope that she might somehow find a way to spend more time with her loved ones, and as a woman of great faith she was surrounded by their love as she passed peacefully from this life into the next.

It was my deep privilege to have known Ivy and to have been blessed, encouraged and inspired by her presence on this earth. To me, she personified the speech attributed to Winston Churchill: ‘Never Give Up. Never Give Up. Never Give Up.’ Ivy NEVER gave up, and I have decided that I won’t either.

As I move into 2015 – the year which my oncologists have predicted may well be my last – I know that releasing my hold on life prematurely and lying down to die in defeat is just not an option. Life is simply too wonderful to contemplate giving up and letting go on the basis of an essentially one-size-fits-all prognosis. Yes, my time will come as it did for Ivy and as it will for all humanity. But like Ivy, I will live each moment of my life with a passionate, joy-filled vengeance. When my time comes, my spirit will remain strong, and like Ivy, I will move into my next life without fear and in absolute victory, undefeated by all of the challenges that will present themselves along the way.

My sincere thanks as always to my buddy LP for taking me on this blissfully sun-shiny underwater adventure. And enormous gratitude to his beautiful wife Julie Bear for insisting that I take her camera for this dive when mine could not be used; this enabled me to make this short tribute film at the precise moment when this beautiful lady left the suffering and joys of this life to enter the greater joys of the next.

Tank you Ivy for being a truly amazing, inspirational presence in my life and in the lives of all who knew you. You are loved and you will be missed. My heartfelt prayers of comfort and peace for your precious family.

Neverending love and eternal bubbles,

PT xxx

ps Tank you so much for reading this blog post. Please check out some of my other ‘scuba versus tumour’ underwater adventures while you are here :-)

pps Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog by email for new post updates, and please follow Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook :-)

Dear Critters,

To celebrate the new year, our anniversary and my Dive 300 together, Spunky Abe and I went to the Solomon Islands (east of Papua New Guinea and northwest of Vanuatu, where we first learned to dive) for a full week of underwater adventures. This vacation began with a fair dose of drama as the remote island we were travelling to was hammered by the start of a cyclone. We found ourselves trapped overnight in Honiara due to cancelled flights and spent our anniversary bunkered down against torrential rains in some random Japanese restaurant where even the staff could not make sense of the menu (thankfully, the food was pretty delicious!) We found ourselves seriously considering whether it would be courageous or foolish to try to move forward once another flight became available, and whether we should try to board the next flight home to move in the opposite direction from the brewing cyclone, rather than risk being caught even closer to the middle of it.

Long story short, after three consecutive 4am mornings and a number of cancelled flights, we finally found ourselves exhausted but onboard a small plane to our intended destination where we managed to do twelve dives (my Dives 300-311). Almost every dive was around 30 metres deep, including a shipwreck, two plane wrecks, this sinkhole, magnificent coral walls and reefs, caves and a brilliant night dive! (I have lots of photos and videos and some interesting stories to share over the coming weeks, so please stay tuned!)

On the final dive day of our trip, Spunky Abe and I undertook a spectacular, full-day expedition. Four very different dive sites connected by the kind of jungle lagoon passages you might expect Indiana Jones to travel. Our first dive was a completely vertical shipwreck (which will be featured in my next post), followed by a stunning barracuda encounter at Penguin Reef and a picnic lunch at a gorgeous private island on the fringes of the most picturesque secluded lagoon (later that afternoon we dived two WWII bomber plane wrecks). After lunch, we marvelled at the deep, clear blue body of water before us. ‘You can swim on this side of the lagoon,’ our Dive Master Deliver advised us, ‘But not on the other side where the water is dark.’ ‘Crocodiles?’ I ask with bated breath, secretly hoping to see one. He nods ominously.

After an hour of lazing in the bright sunshine on the safe side of the lagoon, we boarded our private diveboat once more and back-rolled off it into the Babata Sinkhole. This is a spectacular vertical shaft descending beneath a wave-cut cliff platform down to around 28 metres (think of a mini Grand Canyon underwater!)

This short video will give you just a taste of the majesty of this beautiful site, complete with caves, electric scallops (affectionately known as ‘disco lights’), wreck relics and sea fans. And if you’re wondering what Spunky Abe and DM Deliver (yes, his real name!) were searching for with their torches and magnifying glass in that sea fan, it was one of these impossibly tiny little pygmy seahorses (you could honestly fit at least 10 of them on your pinky finger nail – they are probably around the size of a very small ant or a grain of rice!):

While I am super-excited to share my other videos and stories from this trip, it may take me a little while to finish editing and posting them as I find myself somewhat limited by very low energy levels moving into this new year.(Maybe it’s just taking me a little longer than usual to recover from this trip to the Solomon Islands, which in some ways was  a fairly challenging expedition).

To be honest, I think I’m also still coming to terms with entering the first whole year of my adult life without a career due to my prognosis, but increasingly I am reaching an even deeper level of peace with this transition. I am more than grateful to have the blessing of my extensive medical team to continue diving as much as I am able to, and I am excited to have as many more dive adventures as possible throughout the coming year. As one of my specialists assured me this morning, ‘We just want you to have the best quality of life possible,’ and as I’m sure you and my entire medical team understand by now, spending as much time as possible underwater is definitely my definition of living :-)

While I never used to think twice about it, now it is so strange when I travel to complete my Departure Cards before I disembark from the plane which require me to fill in my occupation. And I wonder to myself, do I actually write ‘RETIRED’ in the small blank space? (Surely that will raise eyebrows when they see I clearly am nowhere near 65 years old …) ‘No longer employed due to terminal illness’ would undoubtedly pose more questions than it would answer, and ‘Unstoppable Aquatic Adventurer’ would most likely cause the customs officers to think I either had not understood the question or had refused to take it seriously.

Then I realise there is a better, simpler and entirely truthful answer to that question, and I etch out my response, carving out my official new identity in black biro: ‘Occupation: Scuba Blogger’. After all, diving is the sole purpose of my travel, as the entire contents of my carry-on and check in luggage will attest. And to my great relief, not one single customs officer or airport official blinks in shock or disbelief, and no-one squints at me as though I am being flippant or pretentious or looks at me as though I am some sort of terminal time-bomb now 5 months into a 6-12 month prognosis …

No matter how I feel as this year progresses, I will endeavour to post frequently and to keep this blog worth reading. I will cherish each opportunity for adventure and will relish every chance to share those adventures with each one of you. Exploring the vast and mysterious underwater water world keeps my sense of awe and wonder vibrantly alive and gives me a blissful sense of fulfilment and purpose.

I recently purchased a hot pink hoodie that reads ‘Live every day as though tomorrow you might DIVE’, and I definitely think that philosophy will work well for me in 2015 :-D So … pushing my supreme tiredness aside, I offer you this as the first of many adventures for this happy new year, and I tank you with all my liddle pink heart for joining me on this crazy ride :-)

Love and bubbles,

PT xxx

ps Tanks so much for taking the time to read this blog. While you’re here, please check out a few more of my underwater and Bucket List Adventures!

pps And don’t forget to subscribe to this blog by email for updates and to follow Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook!

ppps Special request from Spunky Abe … a lot of people who know us personally have begun to call him Abe. He just thought you should know that his real name is Adrian and that ‘Abe’ is just my lazy pet name for him, combining ‘Adrian’ and ‘Babe’. He feels a bit weird now that so many other people are calling him Abe. I think it’s absolutely hilarious :-P :-P :-P

Dear Critters,

You may think it strange that for my birthday, I wished for a blue-ringed octopus. Despite the fact that last week I patted a rhinoceros and a madagascan tree boa, hand-fed three giraffes and spent quality time with a cheetah (you can read all about my extraordinary Birthday Week in my next Bucket List post!), it had been almost two years since I had seen a blue-ringed occy, and something within me yearned for another close encounter.

No, despite being entirely at peace with my terminal diagnosis, I do not have some sort of perverted death-wish. Like sharks, blue-ringed octopuses are much maligned. While their blue rings glow brightly as a warning to anyone who may venture too close, they are not intent upon using their venom unless compelled to for self-defence. In my experience, blue-ringed octopuses are super-sweet, gentle, timid little souls. Without their deadly venom, I fear their distinct lack of courage would make them absolutely powerless against anything which might harm them, whether intentionally or accidentally. The last time I encountered blue-ringed octopuses, I actually saw three in a single dive, each one trying without success to remain entirely inconspicuous and hidden from human view. I felt like I had won the trifecta! (Alas, I cannot for the life of me find the blue-ring photo I wanted to share with you here, so here’s a random anemone from this dive instead …)

Although my best buddy LP and I used to dive Blairgowrie Pier almost weekly, it has been quite some time since this pier has been our first choice for our weekend adventures (like all good things in excess, perhaps we had begun to take it for granted). Yet for the two weekends which bookended my Birthday Week, the constraints of weather conditions led us back to our favourite old underwater haunt for my Dives 312 and 313 which delivered birthday critters galore! How privileged we were to encounter a tiny white octopus, resting inside the mouth of a bottle, a large brown octopus lazing atop of its rusted tin can, small stingrays and banjo sharks, a pair of amorous sea stars, several of the exquisite nudibranchs that Blairgowrie is famous for, and more.

But the moment LP pointed out the tiny grey octopus crawling across the sandy bottom – her rings glowing steadily brighter once she knew with certainty that she had been detected – I knew that birthday wishes do indeed come true. According to my oncology team, the birthday I have just had may well be my last, so you would be correct in thinking that my blue-ringed occy encounter may not have been my only birthday wish :-) It is no secret that I deeply wish for hundreds more days and dives. I wish to exchange all of my wishes for fishes and to trade in all the birthday wishes of my uncertain future for whale sharks, tiger sharks and – against all odds! – to one day encounter an elusive blanket octopus on one of my underwater adventures. (That’s my Bucket List. Legend has it that you cannot kick the proverbial bucket while it still contains unfulfilled dreams, so for as long as I live I will keep adding extraordinary critters onto my list :-D )

But at the same time, I am contented. For my birthday, I whispered a wish for a blue-ringed octopus. And out of nowhere one appeared to wish me a lifetime of joy, no matter how long or short that life may prove to be. Regardless of my circumstances, I am joyful, and filled to overflowing with awe-inspired gratitude. Every breath underwater or on land is an intense blessing that I will never take for granted.

I am so excited to share with you the rest of my amazing Birthday Week adventures (as well as several other films from my recent expedition to the Solomon Islands, including my Dive 300!) over the coming weeks. All in all, I had nine Birthday Adventures over the past week – if this does prove to be my last birthday, I’m determined to go out with a blissful bang ;-) To cap it all off, I am very honoured to be featured in the Australian ‘Nature and Health’ magazine in its Feb-March edition. To those of you who have found your way here because of this article, I extended the warmest of welcomes and hope that you will enjoy some of the other underwater and Bucket List adventures I would love to share with you on this blog :-) And please feel free to follow my posts on the Pink Tank Scuba Facebook page :-)

My friends, life – despite all its many challenges – is an absolute pleasure. And it is my purest privilege to have you along for the journey.

Love and Birthday Bubbles,

PT xxx

Dear Critters,

Blog Entry of Dive 318:  The last week of diving in Melbourne has been some of the best I have ever done. Over the past three or four dives, I have encountered giant stingrays, a hunting blue-ringed octopus, about 1000 spider crabs during their annual pre-migration, one of the largest cuttlefish I’ve ever seen, a large octopus that danced a merry waltz with my dive buddy for our cameras, weedy sea dragons and so much more. It seems they all came out to wish me a very merry end to my happy birthday month which turned out to be very joyous indeed.

However, the piece de resistance came during Sunday’s dive at Blairgowrie Pier where one good deed indeed returned another. Upon getting out of the car, my buddy LP and I had trouble deciding whether to enter by the shore or whether to wheel my bright pink trolley full of heavy dive gear down the long pier to do a giant stride into the water from the platform. Fortuitously I replied, ‘My spidey-senses are tingling. I think we will miss something amazing if we don’t explore the shallows today.’ Lo and behold, the moment we put our masks against the ocean’s bright surface, there in less than a metre of water more than 1,000 spider crabs peered back at us from their pre-migration. Stacking four and five-crabs high, they moved and mated ahead of their mass migration to Rye Pier in about 6-10 weeks time. Had my ‘spidey-senses’ not been tingling, we would have missed this mass of crabs altogether, and indeed by the end of our 90 minute dive, they had all but disappeared by the time we returned to the shore. (I will aim to share my crabby video and photos in a separate post. I am now more than ten videos behind where I should be but plan to work on these to share with you over the coming weeks – please stay tuned!)

LP and I spent half an hour filming and photographing them before swimming off to the far end of the pier to see what else might be waiting to be discovered. While underwater, I crossed paths with another photographer and showed her my spider crab picture to ensure that she had not missed the congregation of crabs in the shallows. She nodded to confirm that she  had indeed seen them, and soon after she returned the favour by indicating to me that a very special creature awaited my company on a nearby pylon (one that I seldom ever visit). ‘Nudibranch?’ I asked, waving my two bunny-ear fingers to resemble the rhinophore antennas of the exquisite decorative sea slugs that frequently adorn Blairgowrie’s sandy floor and pylons. ‘No’, she shook her head, signalling with a single finger in the shape of a curved fishing lure above her forehead. ‘Tasseled angler!’ The heart within me almost leapt to Antartica when my eyes detected the strange donut eye, the gaping titan mouth and the creamy ‘fishing lure’ on the hidden creature’s forehead.

Tasseled anglerfish are the only type of frogfish known to inhabit the piers where I dive locally, but for reasons you might guess from these photos, they are seldom ever seen. These creatures are the absolute masters of camouflage, nestling imperceptibly and virtually motionless against the sponge and weed-covered pylons. In more than 300 dives, I have only managed to spot one three or four times in total. Each time I have felt the joy of every one of history’s treasure hunters combined, elation rising as though shifting sand now revealed an age-old wooden chest filled with untold fortune.

How serenely the fish sat upon its pylon, gazing back at me in mutual wonder, its lure neatly tucked into its seldom-failing disguise, rather than dangling to attract some unsuspecting prey. How quickly I swam back to my buddy LP (intent upon filming the flight path of a large circling stingray) to lead him to the pylon to capture my moment with the ornate tasseled angler (or, as I prefer to think of it, the Fluffy Muppet Fish) before I took a few more shots of it in all its splendid glory.

It had been a very long time since LP and I had met one of these astonishing fish and that encounter is one of the clearest of all my diving memories. We were under the exact same pier several years ago and I was intensely frustrated by some technical issues I was having with my camera. Within seconds of handing my camera to LP, imploring him with my eyes to help me sort out the woes of my misfiring strobe, I snatched the rig back out of his hands, leaving him utterly astonished and perplexed. Swimming less than a metre behind me was a sight I had never seen before or since – a free-swimming tasselled angler! I was completely gob-smacked and absolutely panicked that this bizarre creature might disappear again before I had a chance to capture any proof of what I had seen. Somehow amidst all the mixed adrenaline of the moment, I managed to fire off this single shot of the unimaginable fish that had chosen this precise moment of technical challenge to declare its grotesque beauty in all its finery:

After this extraordinary encounter with a creature I can only describe as a cross between a football with goosebumps and some alien mutant chicken, I realised that life can be – quite simply – completely random and unexpected. That beauty and horror are sometimes indistinguishable. That moments of panic can easily transform into triumph. As I continue to navigate my future diving adventures as an integral part of my journey with terminal cancer, these are indeed amongst some of the most valuable lessons the ocean has taught me to date. Tank you Fluffy Muppet Fish for allowing me to look into all the strangeness of your bizarre countenance and to see myself, all my joys, hopes and fears clearly reflected in the inexplicable weirdness of your eye. You are a wonder to behold, and it has been my absolute privilege to have beheld. I shall endeavour to find you again soon to learn what else you might wish to teach me.

Love and bubbles,

PT xxx

ps Tank you so much for reading through this blog post :-) While you are here, please check out more of my ‘scuba vs tumour’ underwater and Bucket List adventures. (You can subscribe to receive automatic email updates of new posts!)

pps And don’t forget to follow ‘Pink Tank Scuba’ on Facebook! :-) :-)

ppps Heads up to other divers: Blairgowrie Pier in Melbourne, Australia will be undiveable due to marina extensions from late March through to about September, so get in now while you can if you’d like to experience everything this incredible dive site has to offer before it gets an upgrade! :-) :-) :-)

Dear Critters,

As promised, here’s a video my dive buddy Mark ‘LP’ Jones and I filmed recently of him dancing with an octopus (literally moments after we got the chance to play with a beautiful big cuddlefish at Flinders Pier).

Lately we have had some truly special underwater encounters with some absolutely gorgeous, playful creatures. At first I wondered whether this octopus was falling in love with its own reflection in LP’s big round camera dome. But the more I study the footage, the more I suspect that this fabulous occy mistook the lens dome for a tunnel and was trying its best to climb into it! (I am certain that I can detect a few moments of pure bewilderment on the creature’s beautifully expressive face :-) ) I can never get enough of octopuses. Here’s another video I filmed recently of a beautiful occy climbing a pylon under the same pier, along with a few of its friends:

It is an absolute privilege to spend quality time with some of the most amazing creatures in the ocean. I have lots more video to share with you over the coming weeks, and for some time now I have felt fairly sick and unsure whether I would actually be in a position to share them with you at all. However, after my gazillionth CT scan late last week, I am thrilled to report that the tumours I’ve been battling this time round seem to have responded well to the prayers of my loved ones and the palliative radiation I undertook late last year. (Even this gorgeous occy seemed to wish me better health not too long ago: )

Although the scan still shows at least one large tumour, it appears to be significantly smaller than it was on my last scans, and somehow I feel filled with even more life, love and hope that I was before. Instead of wondering now whether every dive might be my last, I feel much more confident that I might have enough time left on this earth to start working on my backlog of videos to share with you very soon. Instead of fearing that each dive might be my last, my heart fills with hope for some wondrous dive adventures for the future :-)

Life is wonderful, Critters, and not a single moment should ever be taken for granted. Tank you from the bottom of my heart to each one who has journeyed along side me, prayed for me, wished upon shooting stars for my recovery, encouraged and supported my passion for the all the extraordinary underwater moments that have made me feel the most alive. I may not be entirely out of the woods as far as my health is concerned, but the smile on my face could not be wider :-D

With much love of life and bubbles of gratitude,

PT xxx

ps Tank you so much for watching this octopus waltz! While you are here, I hope you will check out a few of my other ‘scuba vs tumour’ underwater adventures …

pps And don’t forget to follow PINK TANK SCUBA on Facebook and subscribe to this blog by email for all new posts direct to your inbox! :-) :-) :-) :-)

ppps Also, be sure to check out more of my buddy Mark ‘LP’ Jone’s brilliant underwater films, click HERE!

Dear Critters,

Recently I had an extraordinary encounter with a hunting blue-ringed octopus at Blairgowrie Pier. I have encountered these adorable creatures quite a few times, though usually they are incredibly timid and scurry for cover the moment they have been detected. You may be surprised to learn that (like stingrays) their deadly reputation is more attributable to their means of self-defence than to any intent they may have to cause harm to humans. The last blue-ring I met was during my birthday week dive in February:

On this occasion, I spied the small, mottled creature, its rings glowing blue in anticipation, climbing the sponge-encrusted pylons as it searched for crustaceans. It quickly became accustomed to and comfortable with my presence, remaining intent upon sensing the vibrations of small crabs and tiny red-handed shrimp as they tried to remain hidden behind and beneath sponges and shells. I signalled for my dive buddy’s attention to share my precious find, but to no avail; he had already begun to swim amongst the pylons closer to the shore.

In the past, I have only managed to share a brief few moments with camera shy blue-ringed octopuses, usually as they skulked furtively across the sand from one hidey-hole to the next. To my purest delight, this time I spent a full 20 minutes with the fearless cephalopod; it showed no signs of distress or distraction from its intensely focussed hunting.

Towards the end of our time together, I switched my camera from video to stills, hoping to capture a few images. As I adjusted the position of my strobe, I found myself slightly bemused that my dive buddy Geoffrey (aka ‘Great White’) had finally swum back to find me, virtually pressing his nose against mine to catch a glimpse of the happy little hunter for himself.

Imagine my absolute terror at the moment of realisation that it was not Geoffrey at all whose eyes stared intently back into my own, but a massive smooth ray that lay motionless, its face brazenly pressed against mine. I adore stingrays and have swum closely with them many times, and while I have no fear of them whatsoever, I have honestly never been so startled in all my life!

Panicked by the creature’s fearlessness, I swam as fast as my fins would allow away from the blue-ring along the underside of the pier to find Geoffrey. Very soon it became apparent that the ray had followed me into the shallows, circling endlessly and brushing against me like an enormous puppy wanting to be petted! (I can’t wait to share my footage of this next extraordinary critter with you in my next post.)

Earlier this week, I did my Dive 324 with Geoffrey at Flinders Pier, diving in conditions like the milkiest porridge. Visibility was less than 1 metre and we could barely see each other, let alone find any critters to film or photograph. Other dives yield a cornucopia of unfathomable critters in quick succession, transcending our wildest expectations and mirroring the broader spectrum of life in all its mottled, magnificent madness.

Life is truly wonderful, strange and unpredictable. I grapple with it daily and slowly I am learning to come to terms with its mixed blessings and quirks. Many people harbour untold, unfounded fears of blue-ringed octopuses and stingrays. But these exquisite creatures hold infinite wonder and joy for those who find the courage to face and celebrate their fearsome beauty. Such is the strangeness of life on land and beneath the surface.

Love and bubbles,

PT xxx

ps Tank you so much for taking the time to read this post. While you are here, don’t forget to check out a few more of my ‘scuba vs tumour’ underwater adventures!

pps And don’t forget to subscribe to this blog by email for new post updates straight to your inbox … AND please feel free to follow PINK TANK SCUBA on Facebook! :-D

Dear Critters,

Just as I turned my camera from video to stills to capture another image of the blue-ringed octopus as it hunted across the sandy ocean floor, I felt an unfamiliar black nose press strangely flush against my own. For a split second I marvelled, ‘How bizarre that my dive buddy would return from the far end of the pier to press his face so closely to mine!’ Then in a single, heart-pounding instant, my eyes focused on the beady eyes of the massive stingray staring back into mine, our faces inexplicably connected.

I have swum with the giant smooth rays of Port Phillip Bay many times, relaxed as they brushed gently against my much smaller body.

I adore it when ocean critters appear to initiate interaction, perhaps sensing my love, respect and awe, at times even asking for help to free them from some parasite or entanglement, or just gliding past in curious wonder:

Once I had the immense privilege to dive with a gorgeous big, stingless manta ray that simply loved the sensation of my bubbles against its tummy:

But this monstrous dark creature with its enormous wingspan and its nose against my nose seems to say ‘I see you’ve been focussed on something small for a very long time now. Please show me what it is.’

I am generally unphased by the ocean’s wondrous creatures, from sharks to sea snakes and jellies and everything in between. But in this instant I am entirely caught off guard. Uncharacteristically panicked, I bolt as fast as my fins will propel me towards the shore to narrate my disarming encounter to my buddy Geoffrey (aka Great White) as we bob on the surface in the shallows.

But the enormous ray has followed me like an eager puppy, now darting between the pylons, approaching me again and again with no regard for physical boundaries. It circles endlessly, gazing deeply into my camera lens, stopping only once an arm’s length away to indulge in a feast of hidden crab beneath the sand.

Some dives reward patient divers with a brief glimpse of such creatures far off in the misty distance. ‘So what,’ I wonder, ‘has drawn this ray towards me like some sort of irresistible magnet?’ While the creature may simply be playful and curious, perhaps the large, raw scar on the front left of its body is causing pain, and I am seen as some sort of  potential physician? Or maybe I have crossed an invisible boundary too close to a nursery of baby rays in the shallows, the devoted parent eye-balling me to declare its protective intent.

Whatever the reason, the ray circles closer and closer, until several times it practically glides beneath me in less than a metre of water. And while I do not sense any hostility (and the ray has no cause to exercise the sort of self defence mechanism that has made its species synonymous with Steve Irwin’s tragic death), it is I who feel the need to exercise self-defensive precaution, sliding my camera rig down my leg as a barrier against the ray’s long barb which is genuinely too close for comfort. It seems to understand that while I am filled with infinite respect, my tolerance for its intense familiarity has reached its reluctant limit, and the pensive creature disappears into the distant blue.

Moments such as these fill me to overflowing with gratitude that I am alive, and with every dive, that gratitude intensifies. Recently I recorded a radio interview (which you can listen to HERE), where I marvelled that of my (now) more than 330 dives, all but one were done with cancerous tumours in my body.

Like this stingray, cancer is fearful and deadly to the minds of many, conjuring nightmarish terror and gut-gripping dread.  But as I explained in this interview, I refuse to be consumed by fear. I have stared intensely into the fearsome beast’s beady eye, and while I know it has the potential to destroy me, I choose instead to see all the wonder of the universe in my own small eye, reflected back. Every breath is an intense privilege, and I am utterly in awe of life and feisty stingrays, and every innocuous grain of sand, and every bubble that rises from my lungs through my lips towards Heaven in the purest form of gratitude. Life is truly exquisite and joy floods my soul.

With love, bubbles and absolute bliss,

PT xxx

ps Tank you so much for reading this blog post. While you are here, please check out some more of my ‘scuba vs tumour’ underwater adventures …

pps And please don’t forget to follow Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook (and subscribe to this blog by email for all new updates direct to your inbox!)

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Dear Critters,

Recently I had the most incredible weekday dive at Blairgowrie Pier in Melbourne with six other divers. The objective of the dive was to see whether we could locate any of the fascinating and cutely grotesque tasselled anglerfish that disguise themselves as soft corals and sponge and are exceptionally difficult to find. I am thrilled to report that, amongst many other creatures, we managed to locate four of these extraordinary ‘fluffy muppet fish’, as I love to call them. Here’s the proof (just look for the crazy eye, the open mouth and the V shaped, cream coloured fishing lure on the forehead!)

Within the group, we also managed to see a large smooth ray, a shovel nose ray, a squad of calamari squid, a tiny cuddlefish, the odd spider crab, a stargazer and a large seahorse (here’s a short bonus video, featuring a couple of these pretty critters :-) )

Right at the end of the dive, I came across this small angel shark, swimming then burying itself beneath the sand in the shallows like a stargazer. This is only the second time I have ever come across an angel shark. The first was on a night dive in 2011 when I was one of the first people in Melbourne to stumble across the spider crab migration by the light of an eerie full moon at Rye Pier.

Far from being the docile little angels they appear, the two angel sharks were most agitated by my filming of them as they attacked the crabs, and they quickly turned their aggression towards me and the bright light on my camera. Apparently they can deliver a rather nasty bite, so I am fortunate not to have sustained any injuries. Feeling slightly guilty, I was somewhat grateful when they turned their feisty attention back to the unfortunate crabs they were feasting upon.

Within the coming weeks, the spider crabs should once again commence their mass moulting and mating aggregation at Rye Pier. The heart within me leaps with anticipation; I cannot wait to share this extraordinary upcoming event with you! Next goal on my Bucket List: 365 dives – one for each day of the year (I’m already up to 338 :-D ) And whale sharks and tiger sharks somehow would be completely awesome too :-P

Love and bubbles,

PT xxx

ps Tank you so much for reading this post! While you are here, please check out a few more of my ‘scuba vs tumour’ underwater adventures on this blog :-D

pps And don’t forget to follow Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook, as well as subscribe to this blog by email for all new posts direct to your inbox! :-D

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Dear Critters,

Last weekend Spunky Abe and I took a 14 hr road trip to visit the beginning of the giant cuttlefish mating aggregation in Whyalla, South Australia. Our good friend and long-time dive buddy Mark met us there and we did a total of two dives with these magnificent creatures.

Each year when the water temperature begins to drop, thousands of giant cuttlefish (also known as sepia apama) make their way into the shallows of the remote coastal town of Whyalla.

There the males can outnumber the females 11:1, resulting in some spectacular efforts on the part of each male to prove himself a worthy mate.

The males will dazzle potential mates with extraordinary strobing patterns across their bodies. They flex their longest tentacles, the largest suitors impressing the lady of their choice with their superior size and grace. Competition is fierce and ranges from males out-dancing one another to fighting one another, sometimes even to the death.

Smaller males have no option other than to resort to subterfuge, masquerading as females to sneak beneath the radar of larger males that may do them harm. Once the larger male has successfully mated head to head with the female, inserting his sperm into a space within her body, alongside the sperm of the many others she may agree to mate with.

A few hours later, the female will select which donations she will use to fertilise her eggs, attaching them beneath ledges from which the new generation of cuttlefish will emerge.

Neither parent will ever see the new hatchlings; nor will they return to deeper waters. Once their mating duties are completed, both adult males and females will perish, literally disintegrating in the water, their internal shell (commonly known as ‘cuttlefish bone’) leaving one last tell-tale sign of their existence upon the nearby shore. Usually they have lived no more than 18 months, and suspended in the water beside a mate, they seem to have a strange, knowing acceptance of the inevitability of their impending demise.

The opportunity to observe the mating aggregation of these majestic creatures first hand is sweet and sad, filled with moments of tranquility and intensity. And though as humans we marvel at the undeniable intelligence and ingenuity on display, there are moments when we can feel as though we too are being observed as objects of wonder by these majestic creatures as they briefly share their watery space.

Life is filled with many blissful mysteries. It is my enormous privilege to be able to share this one with you.

Love and bubbles,

PT xxx

ps Due to some technical difficulties, I have many more giant cuttlefish images to add to this post over the coming days, so feel free to come back for another look soon :-D

ps Tanks so much for reading this blog post. While you are here, please check out some more of my ‘scuba vs tumour’ underwater adventures … :-)

pps And don’t forget to follow Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook, and to subscribe to this blog by email to have all new posts delivered directly to your inbox! :-D

Dear Critters,

The gorgeous marina of Nelson Bay, Port Stephens

I had been wanting to visit Nelson Bay in Port Stephens, NSW for quite some time, due to their excellent citizen science Nudi Fest events (where divers collect data about the diverse population of exquisite decorative seaslugs) and to visit the amazing population of grey nurse sharks at nearby Broughton Island. So I was both surprised and delighted several weeks ago to receive an invitation out of the blue to travel interstate and dive with Let’s Go Adventures  as a special guest for their Women’s Only Shark Dive event on 18 July.  This dive was to be part of the inaugural PADI International Womens Dive Day (which just happens to be in the middle of winter in the temperate waters of Australia!) PADI (the world’s leading scuba training organisation) were kind enough to feature an interview with me about my ‘scuba vs tumour’ adventures in their ‘Women in Diving’ series leading up to this very special event.

Huge tanks to this awesome operator!

I decided to book a five night stay which would allow me the opportunity for four days of diving. Rob Miller from Let’s Go Adventures is genuinely one of the friendliest and most considerate people I have ever met, and it was an absolute privilege to dive with this excellent operation (I cannot recommend them highly enough!) Rob introduced me to two pairs of divers who were also visiting the area to be my new dive buddies for the shore dives: Steve and Jayne, a beautiful older couple who caught up with me regularly throughout the trip, and Shar and Sal, two super-gorgeous dive instructor mermaids from my home state of Victoria.

The critter-rich muck diving site, The  Pipleline

The tide turns quickly in Nelson Bay resulting in two shore dive opportunities each day, not much more than an hour long. Yet this seemed merciful given the coldness of the water that had been somewhat affected by an extremely unusual arctic weather event. But these shore dives are critter-rich and well worth the effort, especially in finer, warmer conditions, with Nelson Bay attracting divers from all over Australia. As I’m used to travelling an hour each way for every dive in Melbourne, it was a joy to find such excellent shore diving with easy access less than five minutes drive from the dive shop at the marina. My first morning dive at The Pipeline was filled to overflowing with pairs of tiny cuttlefish, nudibranchs, seahorses and a blue ringed octopus.

Cuttlefish pretending to be a zebra

That evening, I re-entered the water at the extremely popular dive spot known as Fly Point with a marine scientist and her assistant who were studying nudibranchs. The water was even colder than it had been that morning, and apart from the appearance of a wide array of nudibranchs the dive was not especially eventful, covering only a small, shallower segment of the world-renowned site. Exiting the water against a bitterly cold wind, I drove my rental car back to my accommodation still in my wetsuit, rather than dare to try changing into dry clothes in the carpark at near freezing temperatures. Days later, no amount of herbal tea, vegetable soups or hot baths seemed able to dispel the cold that had set into my bones from that night dive. Shivering to the core against the night air, I hung all my wet gear out along the fence of the small pool, hoping against all hope that somehow my gear might begin to dry in the winds that blew overnight, ready for my second attempt to dive Fly Point the next day.

Jayne and PT at start of Fly Point Dive

I woke the next morning, configured my camera, brought my gear in from the pool fence, half-donned my wetsuit and was just about to load the car when to my horror, the key of my rental car was nowhere to be found.  I tipped everything out of every bag and piece of luggage three times before discovering the elusive car key outside on the BBQ near the pool fence. Although I knew that I had well and truly missed my opportunity to join Steve and Jayne on this dive, I drove to the site to observe the conditions. The surface was choppy and dotted with white caps; it certainly did not appear to offer ideal conditions for diving. Hopefully I hadn’t missed too much?

Blue Dragon Nudibranch

But the reality of what I had missed soon became clear when I caught up with Steve and Jayne at a cafe later that day after consoling myself with lunch and souvenir shopping at the marina. Mating octopuses. A fiddler ray and a rock cod fighting over a fish that Steve then claimed from them and hand-fed to a hungry wobbegong. Nudibranchs too spectacular for words.  I comforted myself with the knowledge that tomorrow would bring the much anticipated PADI Women’s Dive Day with the magnificent grey nurse sharks at Broughton Island. Within minutes, I learned that the shark dive had been cancelled due to worsening weather conditions. But somehow my spirits remained buoyant and I felt more than blessed, not only to be on vacation at Nelson Bay but for the very fact that of being alive at all. The photographer and reporter from the local newspaper who came to interview and photograph me at the dive shop to report on my interstate visit told me ‘Well, if positive attitude counts for anything, you’ll probably live forever.’

Jayne, PT, Rebecca and Jacqui at the post-dive BBQ

There is so much that is genuinely beyond our control in life, but what we can control is our response to whatever life presents as it unfolds. My five year roller-coaster journey with recurrent cancer has definitely taught me to go with the flow, and for me a positive attitude beats a happy ending every time. So I embraced the substitute dive with around 14 lovely mermaids at Fly Point, seeing it as an opportunity to make up for the dive missed the previous day due to the misplaced car key. And my spirit stayed bright when this dive was plagued by bad vis and lost dive buddies from the group of five that I was supposed to be in, finding myself without any clue where I was going underwater, but lost in good company with the lovely Rebecca who stayed by my side throughout the entire dive. Even though I took very few photos and was unable to take any video footage during this dive due to the silty conditions, as always the blessings far outweighed any potential disappointments or frustrations. Simply being alive to experience anything at all remotely pleasant is a blessing beyond measure. Although conditions did not allow me to experience Fly Point at its well-versed best, I felt grateful to have had the opportunity to dive at such a special spot at all.

Rebecca & PT exit the water

I exited the dive with my buddy Rebecca and we posed on the stairs that led from the water for some more pictures for the newspaper (I’m the little critter on the right). The smiles on our faces tell it all. This is how I feel when I have just emerged from any dive, no matter how bad the vis is, no matter how lost I become, no matter how few critters I may have seen. The newspaper reporter had asked me the previous day ‘What does diving give to you in going through your cancer journey?’ and I had momentarily struggled to find words to convey what can only be explained by the look upon my face in the photo above. ‘Bliss,’ I answered him. ‘Diving gives me bliss.’ And my bliss doubled when the staff at Let’s Go Adventures informed me that the shark dive to Broughton Island had been successfully rescheduled for the following day.

Banded Coral Shrimp at Fly Point

I boarded the boat (genuinely one of the best boats I have dived from) along with just four other divers. Together with our Dive Master Alex and Skipper Steve we headed out across 2.5 mtr swell to Broughton Island in search of the critically endangered resident population of grey nurse sharks (click HERE to learn more about these amazing, docile sharks). I enjoyed sitting in the cabin talking with the Steve for the hour long journey, the conversation helping to keep my mind off the inevitable seasickness that threatened to take its toll. Descending 15 mtrs beneath the surface upon arrival at North Wall, we encountered some serious surge and a long swim past tens of thousands of spectacular schooling yellow tailed bait fish to an underwater canyon where ten large grey nurse sharks awaited us.

There is something intensely serene about spending time in the presence of these beautiful creatures as they appear unexpectedly through shimmering walls of baitfish, or suspend themselves motionless in the centre of the canyon before gliding with the slightest of movements. There is nothing menacing about them, and when the other divers had run out of air half way through the hour long dive, I found myself totally enraptured by having the sharks almost entirely to myself. Wobbegongs, Port Jackson sharks and grouper fish like big blue puppies swam merrily amongst the much larger grey nurses.

While some of the sharks were furtive, one seemed to have much greater confidence in my presence, and together we swam the length of the canyon, then turned around again and swam in the opposite direction at little more than arm’s length apart. This is my serenity – facing what most people fear and finding the simple beauty of deep connection. I cannot do justice in words to how swimming alongside sharks makes me feel, but the words peace, tranquility and bliss all come to mind.

Fish resting on sponge daybed at Fly Point

It saddened me that the rest of the group voted not to do their second dive at Broughton Island with the grey nurses, but as less experienced divers they did not seem quite as comfortable as I was to swim with the surge. Yet somehow they all managed to maintain their composure on the boat to the next site while I upheld my lifelong tradition of becoming violently seasick on the way to the Cabbage Tree site with its relatively small pieces of boat wreckage. Although not as exciting to me as the sharks, this dive was nonetheless a milestone. Dive 365 – one dive to celebrate each day of the year. The amiable skipper Steve kindly presented me with two grey nurse shark teeth, one as a momento for each dive, and I received them with joy. My delight was doubled when I later learned that my dive buddy LP had spotted a humpback whale at one of our regular dive spots back home at the same time as I had been gliding with the grey nurses. Such are the blissful miracles of exploring the ocean’s vast wonders and mysteries!

Later that day I learned that, while I had been relaxing with the grey nurses, Aussie surfer Mick Fanning and a shark had almost scared one another half to death in an unexpected close encounter during a world title surfing competition in South Africa. While the media sensationalised the encounter as an ‘attack’, I am inclined to think that the human and the shark just happened to find themselves both in close proximity of the shark’s territory at the same time. While Fanning was justifiably shaken, the fact that he emerged unscathed is testament in my mind to the fact that the shark bore him no malice. It seems as though the shark was merely investigating its natural habitat and probably just became entangled in the surfer’s leg rope. It saddens me that Spielberg’s ‘Jaws’ once again sets the tone for the world’s response to this incident in which the unsuspecting shark is villainised despite having shown no aggression and causing no damage to the person it encountered in its home turf where it had every right to be.

As a Sharkaholic, the grey nurse shark dive at Broughton Island was definitely my highlight of the trip (and well worth the trek for anyone who is keen to dive with sharks), but the people I met are equally treasured. I am so grateful to have met and spent time with Rob and Sarah, Steve and Jayne, Sal and Shar, Rebecca and Jacqui, Emma and Adam and several other locals who made a lasting impression on me. My enormous thanks go to the staff and crew of Let’s Go Adventures for making this fantastic adventure possible. And huge congratulations go to PADI for the success of their first ever Women’s Dive Day – may there be many more to follow!

Had no idea I was posing in front of 7 spear guns … not quite my message, but I do really love everything else about this dive shop :-) 

Love and bubbles,
PT xxx

ps Tanks so much for reading this blog post. While you are here, please check out a few more of my ‘scuba vs tumour’ underwater adventures (there are plenty of other shark dive videos and photos to be found on this blog :-) )

pps And don’t forget to follow Pink Tank Scuba on Facebook and subscribe to this blog by email for new posts to be delivered directly to your inbox! :-D

ppps I 100% recommend that you  put diving with the incredible grey nurse sharks at Broughton Island  and my wonderful friends at Let’s Go Adventures on your Bucket List. You should ask about their affordable Dive House accommodation less than 10 minutes from the dive shop which is where I stayed in the Queen Room (and be sure to tell them PT sent you! ;-) )