The flight to Cairns was fine and uneventful. I got to the airport in the morning and got a shuttle bus to the main road, the Esplanade, where I started to walk up and check out a couple of places. I got to a hostel and saw a couple of girls who were walking the other way, so I just asked them what they had seen up the road. Not an awful lot, so the 3 of us checked into the Esplanade Hostel where we were.

By the time I had checked in and got to the room, then had dropped off their bags and headed straight out. I dumped my kit and decided to go and check out the town and look into some diving trips. I didn’t want to waste too much time here and wanted to get diving as soon as possible. I was looking for a live-aboard boat where you go out for 3 days and 2 nights and just dive all day.

I spoke to a couple of shops and finally decided on Pro Dive. They had a nice shop, new looking equipment, nice people. They seemed to focus on safety and I had a good feeling, so I signed up. The next trip was leaving in a couple of days, so I had a bit of time to chill out and check out Cairns.

I walked around the town and checked out the Lagoon. The beach at Cairns is horrible, well, it actually isn’t really a beach, just a big mud flat. So you can’t go on it or swim in the water. It is all mud and there are stingers (Jelly fish) in the water, so they have created a large open air salt water swimming pool right by the sea. The water was very clean and apparently all the water in the lagoon is filtered every 3 hours!

I met up with the Candian girls later that day and got chatting with them It turned out they have had some rather dodgy roommates before, so they were happy to latch on to me and I got dubbed “Best Room mate”. They really must have had some dodgy people!!

They were from Toronto and called Sally and Danielle (or Dee). They turned out to be a hell of a lot of fun and the partying really started here! Over the next couple of days I got introduced to Goon. Goon is an Australian Backpacker classic. Really cheap wine that comes in 4 litre boxes and tastes disgusting. Because Australia is fairly expensive backpackers tend to get loaded up on Goon before the go out and then spend less in the bars. We were mixing the Goon with a bit of Sunkist fizzy pop (like fanta) to try to hide the taste a bit!!

We had a really fun night out and met Vicky... who was a legend. Dee fell in love with Vicky and they became pretty good friends. We had a bit of a crazy night out and I became quite keen on Sally. She was so much fun and had a lot of energy. A very good night... I just won’t go into detail about the minor incident in the stairwell!!!

The next day was spent around the lagoon, just swimming and sunbathing. That night we had a Candian night. We made Poutine! I miss Poutine from my Whistler days.

Poutine is Chips, Cheese and gravy. We even found ourselves a bottle of Kokanee to share!!

We may have had a bit more goon and another night out. Not great, since I had to meet at 6:20am

Diving on the Great Barrier Reef
I met my dive crew nice and early, unfortunately I was rather hung over, so tried not to talk to much! We got a mini van down to the Marina where we boarded our home for the next 3 days. It was a nice boat, purpose built for Pro Dive, and the oldest in it’s fleet of 3 dive boats.

After an initial introduction from Warren, our South African Divemaster we were allocated quarters. I was sharing with a French Canadian guy. We arrived at our first reef at about 10:30am and got ready for our first dive. We were at Millen Reef in the Outer Great Barrier Reef and our first dive was at the Petaj dive site. This was a pretty nice dive site and I got to see some Napolean Wrass, which I haven’t seen since diving in Vietnam.

They are huge fish (maybe 1-1.5m long) with a big bump on their forehead, rather ugly fish, but beautiful for it.

Up until now, all my dives have been made following a divemaster around the dive site. Australia is generally very different. I had been told this before, but on the boats the

school gives you a briefing about the dive site and then sends you off to explore it for yourself (with a buddy of course). Initially I didn’t like this idea because when you go with someone who knows the dive sites you get to see the best parts of it. They can also point marine life and corals out to you and tell you what they are. As the weekend went on, I felt much more comfortable with the idea of diving without a divemaster. Even though I am a confident diver my navigation skills suck. Since I only have to follow someone around a site, I rarely take the time to get my bearings and navigate a site. After a few dives, I certainly did get better at this and I think my diving has improved because of it. It also gave me chance to be more in control of the dive, such as depth, air, speed, etc.

Having to think about my own safety, dive profile and also that of my buddies really makes you more aware. So, all in all, I think it was a good experience not having a divemaster present.

Initially 4 of us teamed up to dive. I buddied up with Charlene, a gorgeous French girl. We were probably the most experienced divers in the group, so it made sense. We also

buddied up with Dirk, a South African guy and Gemma, an English girl who left our group after a couple of dives as she was doing her PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course, so had to dive with them. After this, we just went down in a threesome. Charlene and I used about the same amount of air through the dive, which worked out great as we both finished about the same time, but Dirk used his air a bit quicker, so he would often leave us, ascend to the surface and we could carry on for another 15 or so minutes.

The water in the Great Barrier Reef is quite a bit colder than I have been used to in SE Asia. In Asia it was a consistent 30 degrees. Here is it a consistent 26 degrees, and I really felt the difference, even though I was in a thicker, full length wet suit.

I am actually a little disappointed with the Great Barrier Reef. For one of the greatest natural wonders of the world, I was expecting a lot more. Visibility was 15-20m and I was expecting crystal clear waters with 30 or more meters vis! Also, there was a lot of dead coral around and the colours and marine life were no where near as vibrant as I had been expecting. They were some great dive sites, but I really was expecting something a bit more spectacular.

The general Schedule on the boat was dive, eat, dive, eat, dive, eat, sleep, night dive, eat, drink, sleep. We did this for the first 2 days and then the third day was a very early start with 3 dives completed before lunch, to give us time to sail home at a reasonable hour.

We saw plenty of cool marine life on the dives, lots of White Tip Reef Sharks, Turtles, Mauri Wrass, Giant Barracuda, Trumpet Fish, Anemone Fish (Nemo fish from the movie Finding Nemo), Trigger Fish, Giant Clams, Blue Spotted Lagoon Rays, Bat Fish, Nudi Branches, Flatworms, Lion Fish, Banner Fish, Giant Trevally, etc.

On one of the night dives, I had a bit of a scare and got to put my Rescue Divers skills to the test. Nothing serious. We went down in a group of 6 people. I had teamed up with some of the new Open Water Divers who were not that experienced. I was the most experienced diver in the group, so I took the lead. When we had descended to the bottom of the Buoy Line I counted all six of us, so off we went on our first bearing to the first spot of the dive site. When we arrived there, we realised there was only 5 of us. One of our buddies had gone missing on the 2 minute swim over. I told 3 of the group to stay put while me and my buddy, Dirk, went for a 1 minute search to find the missing person. I hadn’t been able to figure out at this point who it was that was missing as it was dark and difficult to identify people. While we were off searching, 3 more people joined the 3 I had left behind and they though it was us, so they carried on with the dive. I chased after them for a bit to try and get them to stop so I could figure out who was missing (as we hadn’t found the missing diver) but realised I would waste too much time, so me and Dirk ascended and fortunately he knew who was missing. We swam back to the boat and I raised the alarm. Fortunately the missing diver was back on the boat. During the descent she had problems equalising and was not able to get any of our attentions, so she had to go back up. To force her way down to us would have probably exploded her ear drums, so she did the right thing. I think when I counted 6 people before we started, someone from another group was sitting with us so added to the confusion. Once I knew the missing diver was safe, Dirk and I descended again and carried on our night dive, but stayed close to the boat as we had already used half of our 30 minute dive time. In the end we had a great dive and saw a few White Tip Reef Sharks and a beautiful Blue Spotted Ray. When we finished the dive I spoke to the main instructor on board to check I dealt with the situation properly and he said I did everything perfectly. It was a very simple situation, and no-one was hurt, but it was good practice of my training. I was proud of myself that I stayed calm, assessed the situation, took clear control, let other people know what was going on (telling them to stay put while we went for a look around) and then decided to terminate my own dive to go back to the boat. It is so important to stay calm, and a night dive situation is so much more confusing than it would have been in the light.

All in all, I had a fantastic time on the boat. There was a great group of people on board and we all had fun.

Back in Cairns and I met up with the Sally and Dee again and we spent the next couple of days together before I moved on to mission Beach. This was more of the same, partying at night and chilling around the Lagoon in the day.