Water and Me (3)

Have you ever snorkeled? You should, you know. It is such a calm, pleasant, wonderful activity. It's what swimming is for, especially if you are anywhere near the Great Barrier Reef. You can get a boat which takes you far off the coast and allows you to enter the water via a platform, with steps, so you can enter the water decorously and without fussing the fish.
There below you are the corals; purples, pinks, greens, milky-colours. They are multi-shaped, some like stag horns, some like clouds, some spiky, some smooth. And above, below and between swim thousands of multicoloured fish.
I found Nemo so many times I felt maybe it wasn't him at all, but a school outing entirely comprising his relatives. There were fish of all colours and shapes, enormous frilly mouthed clams, into whose insides you could glimpse, sea anemones of all types. There were little rock sharks - nothing scary, and lots of great big boring-coloured fish, swimming round and round, oblivious to us clumsy swimmers.
The wonder of it to me was how a hundred identical blue fish could follow the same course, all turning this way and that together as though by design. How do they know? But they do - and it gave great pleasure to watch them. I'd waited a long time for this, only ever seeing this on television through someone else's camera, and now, here I was, swimming in the Coral Sea by the Barrier Reef.
If you've never snorkeled you should seriously consider it. You'll never regret it.