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...

Day 2 of the PADI course was similar to the first with a pool session in the morning followed by a lecture on dive locations world wide and the pros and cons of various "software" (mask, snorkel & fins for the uninitiated). Lunch with the whole group at a burger restaurant (no not McDonalds!) was followed by a visit to the PD shop to give us the opportunity to purchase said software (which we did!) I did the exam whilst Nicola did some research for the days...

Fantastic breakfast, "Hotel Cairns" will have a lot to live up to. Pro Dive picked us up at 08:30. Met by Awesome Jack (our classroom instructor) and Nervous Andrew (on trial for a job with PD) The day was filled with classroom in the morning, medical at lunch and our first pool session in the afternoon. Met "Normal" Georg from Munich who was taking a parallel course for German speakers The course was run at a frenetic pace and Nicola decided at the end of the...