PADI Qualified Scuba Diver

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I am pleased to tell you that I am now a Certified Adventure Open Water Diver. Basically I am now allowed to scubadive to 30 metres unsupervised, but always with a buddy.

For those of you who know what happened on my first scubadive experience in Turkey, you'll be happy to know I have mastered not holding the deflator above my head the whole dive, and also have managed to remember which button inflates and deflates.

On the way up to Cairns we spoke to alot of people who recommended ProDive as a really good company to do the PADI Open Water certificate with. So I decided to book up with them once I got to Cairns. This involved 2 days at the ProDive centre where we were taught in the classroom and in the swimming pool. There was a lot of theory to take in and lots of videos to watch, narrated by mad Americans. Anyway, at the end of the 2 days we had to take an exam, ouch, hadn't done one of those for a while, but got 93%. All 13 of us in our class passed, so on the 3rd day we had to get up bright and early for our 3 day live aboard a boat. Nikki came too, she was already a certified diver, as were a few others who came on our boat.

We had to complete 3 more dives in the open water and successfully complete skills underwater which we'd learnt in the pool. This involved such things as taking our mask off under water, putting it back on and clearing it. Believe me, this is really hard when you wear contact lenses, but I managed. Also, lots of safety skills which we practised with our buddies. Again, we all passed and did somersaults on the seabed.

Diving on the Great Barrier Reef is just the most amazing experience i've ever encountered. We saw sharks.....yes, sharks, although the nice ones, whitetip and blacktip reef shark, a giant turtle, rays, and amazing coloured fish of all shapes and sizes. The coral came in the most fantastic forms and colours. I think you have to see it to believe it. In all I had 8 dives, which included a deep dive to 30 metres, and also a night dive, which was a little scary, but we had torches with us, but at one point we all turned them off and looked behind us, just looking into that abyss is so scary, knowing all the creatures that are out there.

The boat was lovely and spacious, we had our little 2 person cabins, and got enthusiastically awoken at 6am each morning, by an instructor who banged on our doors and said "lets go diving". Literally we'd get up, go for our first dive at 6.30am and then come back to a lovely cooked brekkie.

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