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 didn’t have time to see them the last time I was on Magnetic Island, but time isn’t really an issue now, so I walked up there this afternoon and got some great views of both the bay and the interior of the island!

I think I’ve done everything I’d planned on doing in Australia, and seeing as I’m departing from Cairns and have to travel up the coast again anyway, I’ve decided to go back to Magnetic Island for a while.

I’m hoping to do an Advanced Open Water diving course while I’m there, but even if it doesn’t go ahead, I think I’d prefer to kill time on a small island than in Australia’s biggest city!

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!

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!