After departing the crew and company on the Stella Maris, we stayed a few days in Airlie Beach. All local dive trips were off due to northerly winds kicking up chop and silt, so we thought that our diving in Queensland had come to an end. Luckily, there was one ship, the Reef Jet, that made a day trip to the Great Barrier Reef, or "outer reef" as it's known in Airlie.

Determined to get some more diving finished before returning to Victoria, we booked a place on this day-trip vessel, and were lucky enough to have suitable conditions for one day for it to make its voyage. Reef Jet is a suitable name for the boat, as it's extremely fast. This means more diving, and less sea-sickness. Good all around.

Jacinta's sister, Gwen, was also accompanying us for the trip. Gwen's not a diver (yet), but she does enjoy snorkling, and there's plenty of good snorkling at the outer reef. Gwen was assigned to have our underwater disposable camera for our first dive -- we were going to go beyond its recommended limit of 12 metres or so.

By 10:30am we we had reached Bait Reef, and we were kitted up and ready to dive. The vessel was designed with divers in-mind, so there was plenty of space for equipment, and a nice wide platform from which to hop in the water. The vessel also had an emergency air tank hanging at 5m while divers were in the water, a nice safety precaution. A big thumbs up for the boat.

This was our first experience with decent visbility water. Rather than only being able to see five metres, we could easily see ten or more. It was glorious. Beautiful weather, warm sunshine, clear water and an incredible display of plant and animal life. The corals and underwater geography was stunning, and the fish extremely friendly.

Our route took us along a valley between two coral walls. At the end of the valley was a dropoff, that's where we reached our maximum depth of 17.0 metres, but most of our dive would have been significantly shallower than that.

We gained a friend at our safety stop. A small fish, looking somewhat like an upside down shark, decided that we were extremely interesting and enthusiastically checked us out. It seemed very interested in all our equipment, and checked us over from top to bottom. Well, this certainly was distracting, and made keeping neutral bouyancy quite a challenge. As was revealed in later discussions, this cute little fish was probably checking us out for parasites that it may be able to have for lunch. Once it decided that we were clean, it went on to examine a group of divers not that far away.

Once out of the water we discovered there was lunch waiting for us. Great!

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