we stayed in Cairns for the extra week to do our Open water course, as we all passed the medical we were fine to go ahead! we spent the first 2 days in the swimming pool and classroom going through all the paperwork things. in the afternoon we got our first chance to go into the pool with all the scuba gear on, its actually quite heavy out of the water with it all. we spent the rest of the day going through the skill tests that we had to do to pass the course, the scary one was when we had to take our regulator away, as u cant breathe underwater was a bit scary! still did it though. that night we got taken staright to reef teach whaere we were given a 2 hour presentation about all the fish that we would see and the plant life and how to find nemo! which everyone wanted to do!

we spent the second day in the pool and the classroom as well finishing off the skills so we would all be ready for the boat the next day.

we managed to make it in time for the 6am start to get to the boat, which is always good. it took 3 hours on the boat to get to the first reef we were goin to dive. the sea was quite choppy on the way out which made a few people feel quite ill! no names Carly!!the first reef we stopped at was Milln Reef where we did 2 training dives saw our first sting ray on the dive which was well exciting! and we picked up a sea cucumber which felt pretty weird. the next dives were at The whale reef site, this was the deep dive for the open water we went down to 18m on our fourth dive we saw a cleaning station , which is really bizzare, theres a fish called a cleaner wrasse which goes around cleaning all the fish, and the fish actually que up to be cleaned, just like a car wash!! so weird, but true!!

that night we were given the opportionity to do the night dive, whcih was petrifying! we were jumping into the pitch black ocean, with only a hand torch to see where we were going, but once i jumped in it was fine, and probably one of the best dives we did, everything looks so different at night, we even saw a parrot fish ina his sl;eeping bag! the best thing about the night dive though had to be seeing the turle he was huuuggeee! about 1.5m

 on the last day on the boat we had the chance to squeeze in 3 dives before lunch and having to go back, however because i chose to do the adventure course i still had to do a deep dive, down to 30m which ment that i could obnly do one more dive after that, as i had too much nitrogen in my body. this was my favourite dive out of all of them ,m saw sharks, lionfish, eel's, and i even got narked! was so funny! my last dive was a naturalist dive, where i had to name all the fish that i saw whilst on the dive, was a good dive as well.

all in all had an absoloutly amazuing time and just wanna scuba everywhere now!