Date: 10th August 2011

Place: Cairns

Weather: Sunny

We had a wake up call at 6.45am "/ ready to be diving at 7.30am!! I must have been super tired and dead to the world whilst I was sleeping because apparently an alarm had gone off on the boat that night which was pretty much right next to my room. I didn't hear a thing.

There wasn't any breakfast before the first dive but there was coffee so I made the most of that. It was nice that my wetsuit had dried over night so I wasn't absolutely freezing when I put it on. This dive was meant to be good so I decided to hire the camera for it again.

Whilst we were descending again I was convinced that the hammerhead was going to come out from the murk. He didn't thankfully. It was a really nice dive and I got a great picture of Nemo! There were a lot more colourful fish and another shark which was too far away to get a picture of. We also saw another sting ray which moved to fast for me to snap as well.

I think I was either really nervous about the shark or very excited about taking pictures because my air ran out very fast on that dive and I got down to 50 bar which is the point at which you are supposed to stop the dive. Thankfully at that point we were on our way back to the boat so I didn't have to worry about it too much but I just had to keep myself breathing slowly!

When we got back on the boat it was finally time for breakfast and oh it was worth the wait!! We had mini pancakes and honey, scrambled egg, baked beans and toast, muesli, fruit salad and yoghurt. It was sooo good! And pretty much straight after that it was time for the next dive J.

I was super excited about this one because it was meant to be the best of the trip. I took the camera again. They weren't lying at all! It was awesome. There were loads of pinnacles with coral and fish all up them, and swim throughs that were really high walls and all fish between them. It reminded me of finding nemo when they get to the swim through but go over the top instead where there were loads of jelly fish. There weren't loads of jelly fish there though.

Because I had the camera I wasn't as concentrated on where I was going and kept on bumping into the walls which was annoying. And then the camera ran out of battery which typically happened just before we saw some cool big fish. I managed to take around 140 pictures on those two trips though! I was very sad when it was over because I probably won't be diving somewhere as good as that for years.

The journey back to Cairns took around 3 hours. In that time we had lunch and I went out onto the deck to get some sun. I didn't put any sunlotion on and didn't burn even though it was a fairly hot day and I was surrounded by sea which is normally the worst place to be. Also Australia's sun is ridiculously strong because there is a hole in the ozone layer. I was very proud of my newly strong skin and apparently my legs went quite brown from that trip.

I met Laura at the Lagoon when I got back into Cairns. We told each other about our trips and then head back to the hostel where I had to do a bit of sorting out with my bus pass and Laura went for a run. We decided to have a fancy meal at the Woolshed and go out since it was our last night with a few people on the East Coast.

I had the biggest plate of Enchilada and mash potato which was quite a random mix. We then watched goldfish racing which was hilarious because people basically had to blow bubbles up a fish's bum to make it move faster. We head over to Gilligans again and had a bit of a dance but I was just feeling completely dead and had already had to power through to get there so at about 1am we head home which I thought was pretty good going considering I wanted to go to sleep at around 8pm!