I now know for sure that diving is what I want to do with my life. The 4 days I spent on the MV Kangaroo Explorer were some of the best I've ever had. I am now a certified Advanced Open Water diver (I know it sounds fancy, but it's only about the 2nd level qualification. I can't get jobs with it), and have begun looking into the possibility of doing an internship whilst over here to get up to Divemaster. If I can't do it here, I'm going to save up and do it next year or the year after in a nice warm climate like Pattaya in Thailand, or Bali in Indonesia. The whole time I was there, the one thing I wanted to do was to see a shark. Everyone else did, but it became a running joke that I never saw any. It took til my penultimate dive before I saw a shark. I think it was a reef shark. Still pretty cool. The training began at the Cairns Dive Centre base on Tuesday. After filling in all our forms, we headed to the pool. At first it was all theory work. We even had homework from the book we had. We learned all our skills in the pool, but we were not actually taught in the pool by our own instructor as he had stitches in his head from banging it in the boat. The good thing was he got them out the day before our actual trip. Once getting into the ocean, the difference to the pool was immediately noticeable. It was colder, visibility wasn't as good, and of course it was much bigger with fish this time! It took 4 dives to get us up to our Open Water Certificate. On our certificate dive, we were filmed doing our skills. We then put on a pair of shades for the camera and did a wee dance each. We also took down boards with writing on them for the camera. Then we had an underwater race with our fins off. Ainsley (the only girl in the group) cheated and pulled us all back then swam so she could get the beer! After that, we did a bit of Matrix style zero gravity fighting for the camera. It was great fun! For my advanced dives, I did a boat dive, a deep dive, a navigational dive, 2 night dives, a marine ID dive and a photography dive. The boat dive was really cool. We were taken out in a wee dinghy and had to roll off the boat backwards James Bond style. I thought I'd be disorientated, but I was OK. The night dives were totally different. All you had was a wee torch to see where you were going. Signalling someone else was totally different too. In the deep dive, we went down to 30m. After 18m, some people suffer from Nitrogen Narcosis due to the extra ammounts of Nitrogen being inhaled at the depth. it can make you feel drunk, but I actually felt more paranoid. I thought it was much harder to breathe, but I told myself it was all in my head and got over it. Carl the instrucor took down a sealed empty water bottle, a tomato and an egg. At the bottom, the water bottle was completely crushed due to the pressure. He opened it and filled it with air and some water. When back up at surface level, the bottle was completely rock solid due to the expansion of the air while ascending (Boyles Law). It was so tight, that when Carl opened it, it fizzed away, like a bottle rocket. At 30m, the tomato appeared blueish green, as red and orange are not clearly visible at that depth. But when he shined a torch on it, it was red again. Carl cracked the egg underwater, and the yolk stayed completely together. We were able to hold it and bat it about. A fish ended up biting it, so it popped. Thenavigational dive consisted of using a compass and counting fin kicks to go in a straight line then come back, then to swim in a square. I managed this quite easily. The Marine ID dive was just about being more aware of types of fish and relationships between other species of fish underwater, like cleaner wrasse cleaning larger fish. The photography dive was just to give me better ideas on how to take the pictures. Still didn't get many good photo's! Now for the things that I saw! The abundance of fish was enormous. The one fish you were always gauranteed to see was the Yellow Tailed Fusillier. They often followed us, as they know we sometimes bring food. We saw our first turtle on the first day. We were all able to scratch him, then feed him with some dead coral. He ate the stuff right out of our hands. It was an amazing experience. On the night dives, we also saw several turtles sleeping in amongst the coral. We didn't disturb them, as startling them could make them run out of air. We saw Batfish, Parrotfish (never saw them in their amneotic sack, bit did see a heard of buffalo head Parrotfish, which was quite cool. If you listen, you can hear the Parrotfish biting chunks out of the rock to get to their food. On the 3rd last dive, I spotted a Lionfish. I was so pleased to see this, as after seeing a shark, this was the next most important thing I wanted to see. I've always thought they were really nice. The dive where we saw the shark was by far the best one. In one small area, we saw the shark, a Moray eel, 2 giant Maori Wrasse, a few Batfish and lots of smaller Wrasse like fish. Thomas the videographer initially was pointing out the Moray eel when he spotted the shark. I really wanted a photo, but it was swimming away from us, and I didn't want to loose my dive partners (buddies). One of the instructors actually swam with a shark for a good 5 minutes on one of the dives. Wish I could have done that! We also saw several Rays. I'm not sure what kind the ones in the photo are. Don't think they're dangerous. After hearing about Steve Irwin, think I'll be more cautious of all types of Ray. Well, that's pretty much my whole week summed up. If you haven't already tried it, PLEASE go and experience it. It's absolutley amazing. You won't regret it.