We got up at 6am on Saturday morning to get picked up and taken to the ProDive shop, where we collected our gear then drove to their boat. We had booked on for a 3 day, 2 night live aboard dive trip with a total of 11 dives.

The journey out to the reef took around 3 hours - and most of it was really choppy too! We had breakfast on the way out before it was too bad, and by the time we got there we both felt a little sick! Not as bad as some other people though!

We did our first dive as soon as we got there, on Milln Reef at a dive site called Petaj. It was a pretty good start to things - we saw a reef shark, firedart fish, goatfish, fusiliers and butterfly fish amongst tons of others that we don’t know the names of!

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We were both really excited about sailing the Whitsunday Islands, and we raced up the coast from Hervey Bay (Fraser Island) to Airlie Beach - that took about a day and a half solid driving!

We stopped off in Bundaberg just north of Hervey to visit the Bundaberg rum distillery. That was quite good, we got a few tasters, and a tour around the distillery which was interesting. A little pricey though.

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We picked up our camper van in Brisbane 11th June and headed south towards Byron Bay. We were a little cheesed off with the camper company (Hippie Campers/Apollo) as when we booked it we hadn’t realised that unlike in New Zealand they insisted on taking the full excess on the insurance ($2500!) as a deposit, and it had to be on credit card. We couldn’t afford to do that on card of course so we were forced into upgrading the insurance to reduce the excess which was really extortionate. It meant paying less money on the day to have more insurance. The van isn’t as big as the previous one either which makes it a bit more cramped and more difficult to cook!

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