Heading 'Down Under'

May 25, 2005

On arrival in Cairns Cress, Nicki and myself went about getting ourselves booked onto a dive trip to see the thing Cairns is most famous for, The Great Barrier Reef.
With Nicki and Cress having only a few days left in Australia they opted for a one day trip onto the reef, with two dives, which they said were great.
I had a little more time left so decided to go for a four day trip on Taka to the northern part of the reef to dive Cod Hole.
Boarding at around 5pm on Tuesday we had an all night steam to the Cod Hole area, on the way learning how the boat would be run and working out our dive buddies for the duration of the trip.
Our first dive was at a site called Challenger Bay on Wednesday morning. The coral was amazing with a huge amount of life to be seen. With many similar species to those I saw in Fiji I really enjoyed the dive. It is so much easier to appreciate what you are seeing when you know what it is you are looking at.
We then went to Cod Hole for our next two dives, the first of which was a cod feed. The trip director came down with a bucket of fish to feed the four huge Potato Cod which visited the feeding site. On our second dive we were able to explore the site of Cod Hole at our own pace and take in more of the amazing coral reef and fish life.
We returned to Challenger bay for our final dive on Wednesday which was to be a night dive. Loads of Red Snapper and Trevally followed us throughout the dive using the light of our torches to hunt. We spotted a couple of Moray Eels and some sleeping Parrotfish encased in their mucus sleeping bags.