Broken Down on the Barrier Reef

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So i am now on my own for the next couple of weeks, after leaving Naila in Kuala Lumpar to head to Oz and so far so good. After succesfully getting myself on the plane, from the airport and in to a decent hostel i set out to book my Livaboard trip and went for a walk around the city. Cairns is not that big and you can easily walk around the city, the esplande when I'm staying is very pretty overlooking the water with the harbour 5 minutes walk away, there is a small night market, loads of fancy restaurants along to choose from (managed to find Nandos too....yay) and even a Woolworths.
The weather is against me and it is really grey and about to rain any minute, the forecast for my trip was going to be against me, so much for my vision of making use of the swimming pool and lazy days on the beach, oh well.
I set out for my 3 day scuba Dive trip the next day, planned to stay on the boat for 3 days and get some more experience underwater. The boat to the outer reefs was memorable as we had a 2hr journey in choppy waters with the boat rocking from side to side, not only have i dived the Great Barrier Reef...... i broke down on the Great Barrier Reef as the engine conked out half way there for a while. though captain and very fineeeeee looking assistant was there to the rescue and we made it to the dive boat.

My cabin was cool and am sharing with a Swedish and a German (hey Maria and Ramona) who were taking there open water course. The crew were all really fun, food was great on board (thanks chef Murray) The 3 days on board went so quick, now have 10 more dives done including deep dives and nights dives. We still had to wear Stinger suits which were basically all-in-one lycra looking outfits........ (which kept me ammused especially as half of them had holes in dodgy places) but hey better to wear it then meet up with a jellyfish 20mts underwater. There were 6am dives were on the agenda, meaning we had to get up at 5am, but getting motivated before the sun was up, surprisingly wasn't that bad.

Diving among the reef and all the corals was great and they were huge it is something i have been wanting to do for ages. I found Nemo!!!!! yup, managed to see Clownfish aswell as lion fish, Parrotfish, starfish, moray eels, huge turtles and a white tip reef shark aswell as loads of different fishes and corals. I hired an underwater camera for the first time and went around the ocean floor like a japanese tourist taking a picture of anything that moved, my dive buddy Jenel was just the same so we were a good match diving together, managed to get some cool photos (like 20 out of the 500 i took) though even though the visability wasn't great, need to improve on my skills though but had loads of fun practicing. The night dives were a new experience to and everything looks totally different at night especially when your armed with just a torch to see and guide you. You could get a bit claughtphobic but being surround by darkness but i was ok and managed to avoid seeing late night sharks only coming across some sleepy turtles. One hearraising bit happened while sitting down in the ships saloon for a drink. The 'Man Overboard' alarms (which we had been shown when we boarded) went off and all the crew went in to auto-pilot taking there positions and getting a raft boat out to the man, thankfully it was only a crew member doing a drill practice who jumped in, but good to see they get to you pretty quickly if they needed too (at least that is what i will be telling my mum...hey mum).
Met loads of people on board and learnt how to rescue someone from the sea, pleased i did the trip and wish i was back on the boat already, missing my new friends i made but sure we will keep in touch for dive trips to come. We had some leaving drinks at the Woolshed when we arrived back inland on Saturday which was fun and got a little messy with the free beer and pizza the crew sorted out, but after 3 days i was wrecked from all the early mornings, swimming and diving I headed back to catch up some beauty sleep..... boring i know but i was wrecked.

While in Cairns managed to do a tour to Cape Tribulation and Daintree Rainforrest which was pretty cool, along with Mona and Marie it rained the whole time but we had some laughs.

this part of mt trip was great fun but is now over.... i got my next flight to catch

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