Our final stop on the Greyhound took us to Cairns. We met up with Jo's friend Claire and her boyfriend John at the lagoon and then for a few drinks later on. Our 5 day Open Water dive course started the next day so we wern't out too late but plan to meet again before we move on.

The first 2 days of our dive course was made up of theory in the classroom and skills in the pool. We only had 3 people in our class which was good for training, the 3rd person Katja was really nice and we got on well. Our trainee instructor Jo was studying for her divemaster so was being assessed by Ruth - our qualified instructor who was with us on the liveaboard. There was a lot more study than we had first thought and we should have paid more attention in our Biology and Physics lessons. We both passed our final exam and bought our snorkel equipment as we could see it being a new hobby.

The next day we had a 2 hour boat trip out to the reef to board Kangaroo Explorer. The weather was rubbish which meant a really rough crossing to our liveaboard - any worse and we couldn't have gone! The weather didn't get much better over the next 3 days.

We had 2 training dives the 1st day and 2 on the 2nd day. For each of these dives we had to complete several skills to get our certification. Whilst we were out there we decided to do our advanced course. This meant we had to do a night dive, navigation dive and a deep dive. The night dive was really cool but the conditions were rubbish and all we had was a little torch to find our way. Matt pretended he was in the SAS! We spotted a small reef shark and a turtle but were not as fortunate as some of the others who saw lobsters and crayfish as well.

Our open water course allowed us to go to a depth of 18 meters but with our deep dive, we are now entitled to go to a depth of 30 meters. Our last couple of dives were fun dives (without an instructor) so we could take our camera down and try out our new underwater case. Jo got to scratch a turtle's back and we saw the resident Lion fish.

All in all we did 9 dives which we really enjoyed but we had had enough of the rough seas and were ready to reach dry land when we arrived back yesterday. Jo (our trainee instructor) met us at the marina with the good news that she had passed her divemaster so we are out to celebrate with her on saturday.

We are off to enjoy the weather as it is much better today - typical!