Time to leave Cairns and head South on a 650km drive to Airlie Beach in preparation for sailing round the Whitsunday Islands. We shared the driving allowing us to make maximum progress. Unfortunately as my name is on the rental agreement any speeding tickets will come my way. I was checking Nicola's speed constantly! The agriculture is different from anything we are used to being mainly sugar cane and bananas. The sugar cane is especially interesting as the old...

Great breakfast, tea, toast, peaches and apricots with natural yoghurt, followed by full English breakfast. Spoke to Cilla (a good friend of Bev's who lives in Tasmania) to try to arrange staying with her whilst Henry is parachuting for three days north of Melbourne. Found out Cilla is staying in Melbourne! She insisted on contacting friends to see if I could stay three nights with them and would phone me back (I can). We left our excellent value for money hot...

The final day of diving the Great Barrier Reef saw us up at 05:45 to enter the water at 06:31! Today my buddy was Sari from Finland and we managed to follow the plan. As us divers say "Plan the dive and dive the plan". I find conserving my air very difficult and generally have only enough for about 30 minutes underwater however we did see a White tipped Reef Shark swim gracefully by. The sea was very choppy making it difficult to swim on the surface but Nicola ...

Dive, dive, dive, dive. Up early again to see the sunrise with the first dive at 07:22. Nicola and Nora went swimming for an hour. Second dive was at 11:15. This one completed the PADI course and we all became Open Water Divers able to dive to 18 metres. The next dive (our first as qualified divers) meant we could now attend the briefings given by Chris. They were excellent. Informative and fun with lots of guidance. My buddies were Xander from the Netherland...

Left Hotel Pretentious (did I tell you not to go to Hotel Cairns?) and joined the bus with the other divers for 3 days out on the reef. It became apparent that one of our group had not surfaced (pun intended) and even on a second visit to the hostel there was no sign of Darren. We all felt gutted for him and could not understand why he was not on the bus. Oh well time and tides wait for no man and we headed for the boat "ScubaPro". Safety briefing complete Darre...