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Published: August 20th 2006
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Steffen and me
the german instructor This week Laura and I did a 5 day open water scuba dive course and it was fantastic fun. i am now PADI certified to dive to 18metres - pretty scary huh?!
The first 2 days were spent in a classroom and a swimming pool and getting to know the rest of the group. there were 19 of us learning and we all managed to pass the final exam on day 2 before heading to our boat on day 3. We headed out to the reef - it was a bit choppy and there were a few people being sick but luckily Laura and i had taken sea sickness tablets and felt fine. Our first ocean dive was pretty scary - there were lots of skills to be tested on over our first 4 dives - emergency ascents, clearing our flooded masks and full mask removal and replacement. This was the only thing i struggled with cos i kept getting salt water up my nose!
After the 4 training dives we were qualified and let loose on our own - it was fantastic fun just swimming around all of the coral and watching the fish and i grew to
Chris, me and Ian
in our new narcosis diving t-shirts love it more with each dive. On Thursday we did a night dive - you can imagine how dark it is in the ocean in the middle of the night and we only had a torch and a glowstick to follow the dive instructors. We saw some very cool fish with funny names, numerous turtles (Bryan was a huge turtle the size of a dining table who was sleeping when we did the night dive). We also saw a couple of reef sharks which wasn't as scary as you might imagine. Natasha was my buddy for the night dive and we just held hands the whole way so we couldn't lose each other!
The group of people on the boat were all pretty sound but we did form a small posse of elite people! Laura and I (of course), Chris (Birmingham), Natasha and Martin (the coolest Aussie couple), Ian (Scotland) & Adam (England) plus Kay who is also australian. We ate, chatted together and played cards and name games to entertain ourselves in the evenings on the boat. When doing the name game (where you have the name of a famous person on your head and you need to
guess it by asking yes/no questions) Ian was pretty good in the first couple of rounds but then could not guess Shrek. It was absolutely hilarious as he had worked out that he was a green, grotesque character in the movies but couldn't make the final link and was getting increasingly frustrated. there was a young american boy that joined our game and the boys decided that the name he should get was Ron Jeremy (porn star for those of you not in the know). It was the worst possible thing to give him cos he was only 18 and was sitting reading his bible! needless to say he didn't guess it in the end.
Chris is one of the funniest guys i've met travelling and he kept us all entertained, and usually managed to lower the tone of the conversation! Although his scottish impressions did get a bit tedious and he sounded more like Mrs Doubtfire!! Chris - i know you think it was really good mate!!
So unfortunately our diving adventure was over on Friday ( I did 8 open water dives) and we all went out to celebrate with the boat crew. We went for
a meal and then had drinks on the Esplanade. We couldn't quite get our land legs after spending 3 days on the boat and were still rocking about when trying to stand still. A couple of drinks helped us even out the balance. It was so funny as the instructors suddenly became all sleazy as they'd obviously had their eyes on the girls in their bikinis all week. Aaron "no worries, eh?" tried and failed with Laura. there were 2 girls who had been on our tour who obviously fancied the other instructor Steffen and they made it very obvious by chasing him around and annoying him and even tried to snog him on the last night which was highly entertaining for us.
All in all its been a cracking week - made some more great friends and achieved one of my dreams to scuba dive on the great barrier reef. just need to work on the tan now before i head down the coast. i've bought myself a greyhound bus pass and i'm leaving cairns on tuesday to see the sights of the east coast alone before arriving in sydney to start work.
I hope everyone at
Aaron & Laura...
playing the name game home is good - write and tell me all your goss!
Jx
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