High up on the list of sights that we both wanted to see in Australia was The Great Barrier Reef. Its reputation is world famous but, like other popular dive locations we have visited, we were worried that all we would see would be mostly dead coral killed off over the years by thousands of careless and inconsiderate divers. This is probably also true for the more accessible parts of the barrier reef near to the coastal towns and frequented by day-trippers. However, with a total area of around 135,000 square miles, The Great Barrier Reef is truly enormous (almost 1½ times larger than Great Britain) with the majority of it still in a healthy state.

A keen diver friend had advised us to take a dive cruise for a few days to the outer reef in order to see the coral at its best. Initially, we weren't keen on this idea having seen some of the primitive boats that some dive companies use for live-aboard dive trips but we still checked it out and we were pleasantly surprised by the luxury and size of the boats being used for these outer reef cruises. We chose a 3-day outer reef cruise with Pro-dive in Cairns as this closely matched our requirements and their price was unbelievably low (partly due to the exceptionally good exchange rate). It included 11 dives plus all of the dive gear, all our meals and 2 night's accommodation in a double cabin for less than the price we would expect to pay just for the dives!

Each of the previous times we have been diving we have always been treated like beginners with a lot of handholding throughout the dives. This time, however, we were considered to be "experienced" divers and left to dive on our own for the very first time - which was a little scary. It wasn't that we were worried about what we might meet beneath the waves. We were more worried about finding our way around on our own or even getting lost!

For the first time, however, we did each have an electronic helper in the form of a dive computer. As well as telling us how much air we had left, it also had a depth gauge and a compass and it kept track of the time we were under water and, more importantly, the nitrogen levels accumulating in our blood (which can cause "the bends"). It would warn us (by beeping) if we came up too fast, stayed down too long or if we were running low on air. It even told us how long we had to wait after our last dive before we could fly. This was all so much easier than using dive tables (but we checked them anyway!).

Before each dive we were briefed about the reef that we had stopped at and told where (and how deep) we should go and what we might see. Initially, we seemed to spend most of our time (actually our air) trying to find where we were supposed to get to and very little time looking around but we did get better at this. One advantage to diving by ourselves was that we didn't have any trouble spotting each other - everyone looks pretty much the same underwater in a wet suit and it is easy to occasionally pick out the wrong "buddy" when you dive with a group.

The dives:
In hindsight, 11 dives were probably too many. We visited a total of 6 reefs but they weren't different enough from each other to make them individually memorable. The days were very long too: we were woken up for our first dive of the day at 6am and we finally climbed out of the water after our last dive at around 8pm. However, we still had some very memorable experiences: we saw giant clams, large stingrays, turtles that flew through the water, some small (4-5ft) reef sharks, loads of spiny sea slugs (which fascinated me despite the fact that they moved so slowly), colourful Christmas tree worms (which instantly disappear into the coral when they sense you and then slowly appear to grow again once they think they are safe), hermit crabs, lion fish, puffer fish, parrot fish and thousands of other colourful tropical fish swimming in and around the coral (which we were relieved to see was still in a healthy and quite colourful state).

Back on dry land at the end of our dive cruise. After being afloat for almost 3 days we were staggering around as if we were drunk for 2 days after getting back on terra firma. The Night Dives: Two of our dives were at night and they qualify both as some of our best and worst diving ever. We had never been on a night dive before and we probably would've chickened out if one of the crew hadn't offered to accompany us. It was pitch black out there with the only light coming from the floodlights on the boat (which didn't penetrate very far) and the underwater torches that each of us were carrying. You could only really see what was illuminated in the narrow torch beam which made it pretty tricky when we were swimming between the coral. It looked really spooky too, as our torch beams looked green underwater and when we came across another group of divers it really felt like one of the alien abduction scenes from The X-Files. On the plus side, we did see two really enormous turtles asleep on the bottom that were each about 6ft long, we saw the full 18ft length of a moray eel (we've only ever seen their heads before) and at one point our guide made us all switch our torches off to see how dark it really was and, when we switched them back on again, one of the largest fish I have ever seen was just swimming by us (a hump-headed parrot fish which must have been 3-4ft long and 2ft high) which gave us quite a shock.