Unfortunately I couldn’t do the course due to (relatively) poor weather, but yesterday (my last full day in Australia) I was able to go out on the day trip with Adrenalin Dive, based in Townsville.

I had two ~30-minute  dives with a maximum depth of 23 metres (The deepest I’d been previously was 12 metres!). The marine life at the wreck was incredible! There’s a huge variety of fish, including a couple of giant Groupers and the odd Reef Shark but the highlight for me had to be the Hawksbill Turtles that lived in and around the wreck.

Although the visibility was less than 10 metres (I’m told 20+ metres is normal), these were undoubtedly the best dives I’ve done, and a great way to end my time in Australia.

I’m flying out to Tokyo at the end of March, and I want to spend some time in New Zealand before I leave, so that only really leaves me with 6-8 weeks in Australia. Even if I found a job tomorrow, I don’t think there would be much point in it!

Instead, I’m planning on heading back up to Magnetic Island to get my SSI Advanced diving certificate, then maybe up to Cairns to dive at the Great Barrier Reef, if I can stand the tropical heat, that is!

Other than that, I’ll most likely just be catching up with the guys that stayed in Sydney. Possibly fly out to Perth to see Martin.

If I can do all that, I’ll have seen more of Australia than a lot of Australians!

Rather than sit around doing practically nothing I’ve decided to book a flight down to Tasmania, rent a car, and drive around the island for a week. I’m flying tomorrow and other than staying a couple of nights in Hobart, I don’t really have much of a plan. I think I’d like to stick mostly to the coastal routes rather than use the main inland highway between Hobart and Launceston. I’ve heard the scenery around the island described as “spectacular” so I’d like to see as much of it as I can while I’m there!

I’ve called a few dive centres to try to organise some SCUBA diving either around Hobart or further up the East coast off Bicheno. This has exposed one of the downsides to travelling alone — I have no diving buddy. This, combined with my relative inexperience, means that I’ll probably just have to wait until a boat goes out and hope that I can be slotted in with the group. Hopefully something will turn up, as I haven’t been diving since I was sailing around the Whitsunday Islands.

I stayed at the Arts Factory. It’s about 10 minutes walk from the town, but definitely worth it!

As I only had a couple of days in Byron Bay, the first thing I wanted to do was to dive at Julian Rocks. Unfortunately, something in the air had triggered my hay fever (for the first time in about 3 months!) and blocked my sinuses to the point that breathing was difficult. Diving was out of the question!

Instead I walked out of town and along the beach until I reached the Cape Byron lighthouse, and for a few minutes, was the Eastern-most person in Australia. The walk took just over an hour each way, and was quite steep in places. It probably wasn’t the best day for a hike (the humidity had been steadily rising for a few days), but the strong breeze along the coast made it feel much nicer, and the views from the top made it worthwhile!

I really liked Byron Bay. It was exactly what I needed to recover from Brisbane and Surfer’s Paradise, and a great place to gear-up for a weekend in Sydney with the rest of the OzIntro guys!

Airlie Beach only really exists as a port to the Whitsunday Islands. As a result its economy is based on tourism. There are a couple of nice hotels and restaurants, but most places are aimed at backpackers, which was good for us! The bar in Beaches (where we were staying) was cheap, busy and did great food. It also closed at midnight, so the hostel itself was quiet enough to sleep well after then.

Martin had just come back from a boat called “Powerplay” which the girls were due to sail on a few days later. Unfortunately none of them seemed to enjoy it very much, citing that it was more of a “couples boat” and a bit crowded, with 18 people on board.

I had been looking forward to doing some sailing even before I left Aberdeen, and had gone out of my way to find a good boat. Solway Lass didn’t disappoint! There was a full load of 32 passengers and 6 crew on board when we left, made-up of a mixture of families, couples and backpackers. Still, the ship didn’t feel crowded at all, even in the 6-bed cabin at the bow! As we left port at around 8 o’clock at night it was too dark to get a good view of the ship, but when we got on deck for breakfast the next morning I was struck by the scale of the masts and rigging.

After breakfast, our first stop was to be the brilliant white sands of Whitehaven Beach. This sand is said to be 99% pure, and fine enough to clean jewelry with. Up until this point we had been using a diesel engine for power, as Solway Lass has no keel so cannot sail into the wind, but once we left Whitehaven the wind was at our back and the crew started setting sails. The sails stayed up for rest of the day, until we dropped the anchor for the night in a small bay and watched the sun set behind the islands.

Unfortunately the wind changed during the night, and we were unable to use the sails much on the second day. Although Solway Lass is not equipped for SCUBA diving, we were met by a ribbed dive-boat and myself and another passenger spent the morning diving further round the coast. It was my first dive away from Magnetic Island, and the water was much clearer and the coral and fish were far more colourful. At one point toward the end of our dive, we heard whales calling loud enough that at one point our guide thought they were right behind us! He wasn’t far off, as we saw a pod of whales swimming a couple of hundred metres away once we got back on the dive-boat! After lunch and an afternoon of snorkeling, we anchored for the night in a long inlet, between hills covered in thick forest.

With the wind at our back again, our last day on the ship was spent mostly under sail as we made our way back to Airlie Beach. I had grown used to the calm and quiet on board the ship, but after a relatively quiet night out in Airlie Beach, I was back on the bus at 7am and heading down to Fraser Island.

I’d been told that there weren’t many reasons to stop in Townsville unless visiting relatives or conducting urgent medical business. As far as I could see, it has a small ferry terminal, an RAAF base, a few (mostly empty) pubs and thankfully, a couple of doctor’s clinics! When I checked into my hostel I made a point of asking if there were many places in the town were I could get my dive medical. After being assured that it was a very common request around these parts, and that all the clinics accept walk-in patients, I went to sleep feeling a lot more relaxed. I soon found out that these were all lies! Except the part about dive medicals being a very common request. So common in-fact that the next appointment one clinic could give me was in 6 days away! Eventually, and after a little bit of exaggeration, I was given a cancelled slot for the next afternoon. The medical itself was a lot more thorough than I had been expecting, but after an hour of being poked and interrogated, I was given a sheet of paper saying I was allowed to go diving.

I arrived on Magnetic Island that evening, and started the course early the next morning. As I slowly woke-up, it dawned on me that the other five people on the course were German, and that all but one of the instructors spoke German as a first-language. The course started with a lot of theoretical work. We were given a manual and told that we had to complete a multiple-choice exam before we were allowed into the ocean. This was a lot like the driving theory test, but with questions relating to Boyle’s Law, hydrostatic testing and partial pressures of nitrogen. This occasionally led to problems with translation. All the teaching materials were in English, leading to frequent breaks to rephrase more technical information in German. For example, apparently, there is no direct German translation for the word “Condemned”. Over the first couple of days, we only spent around an hour and a half in the pool doing practical skills. On the morning of the third day, we set-up all of our equipment, squeezed into black neoprene suits and staggered down the beach to the warm water of Nelly Bay.

These first two open-water dives were mostly spent performing the tasks that we had learned in the pool. These were things like clearing water from a mask, retrieving a lost 2nd-stage air regulator, and removing and replacing the buoyancy compensator jacket. The visability was around 8 metres on the first couple of dives. Not spectacular, but easily far enough to see things clearly. At one point, while kneeling on the sea-bed, an 18-inch stingray came along and sat next to me in the sand for a few minutes, before darting off into the coral, presumably looking for something more interesting. Our second day of open-water diving was much longer. Two dives in the morning, followed by another two in the afternoon. The morning session was mostly spent on more skills, but in the afternoon session we were free (as a group) to swim over the coral formations that are dotted around the bay. The visibility had decreased again, but we were still able to spot plenty of stingrays and even a small shark amongst the reef!

I really enjoyed the diving, but the early starts and breathing so much dry, compressed-air tired me out to the point that I didn’t really get to see any of the island itself. I’d like to come back here sometime in the next few months and take a few days to wander around a bit, and maybe do the Advanced Open-Water course, but now I’m off down the coast again to Airlie Beach where I’m going to jump onto a boat and sail around the Whitsunday Islands for a few days!