Five weeks sounds like a long time when planning a holiday to Australia and New Zealand but the reality bites when you get there and the places you want to visit are no longer dots on a map separated by millimetres but by many hundreds of kilometres.

From the outset we had hoped to get some diving done; we’d seen the pictures and heard the stories, many from club members. Our first destination was staying with friends living on the outskirts of Melbourne, Victoria and it was from there that we travelled down the Mornington Peninsula in a borrowed ute to a PADI Dive School called Bayplay located in the propitiously named town of Blairgowrie, a mere two hours drive away!

Staff all very friendly and helpful and so we were briefed for two shore dives with our guide Sonia and another local diver. The weather at the time was warm but windy with sea state of about 2 and negligible tidal range. Entry for the first dive was from Ryesea pier and the visibility wasn’t quite what we expected on our first Oz dive being only about 10 metres max but there was a manta ray hovering around the point of entry. Unhappily it must have seen us coming because that was the closest we got to it. Nevertheless there was an abundance of life to be seen; perhaps the most memorable were smaller sting rays, wrasse and puffer fish plus numerous seahorses, many species of crabs all within 12 metres of the surface above a sandy bottom all in all a well spent 50 minutes.

After lunch we headed a little further along the coast to our second dive site with the promise of diving with dragons – sea dragons! This was again entry from a pier at Portsea although in a more sheltered spot with better visibility. If you’ve never heard of sea dragons before they are a bit like sea horses but classified as fish. We saw a variety called leafy sea dragons, yellow and black in colour, the adults being about 30cms in length – amazing creatures, they look as if they have little rotor blades attached to their extremities. Again a shallow dive but then that is where so much life is to be found, and where the natural light still allowed us to see things in their true colours.

Our next diving opportunity was some 2500km away in Tropical Far North Queensland -immediately post Cyclone Larry - staying with ‘the rellies’ who live in Cairns. Once again the loan of a fantastic vehicle – a Toyata Landcruiser this time – saw us heading north again to Port Douglas where we’d booked a day out on the outer great Barrier Reef courtesy of Quicksilver.

For those who aren’t familiar Quicksilver pretty much are the reef, actually owning a part of it and having huge pontoons for staging and accommodation some 45km out from the coast. We took a dive boat, the Silversonic (huge jet powered cat actually), with a party of around 16 divers and twice that number of snorkellers out to Agincourt Reef where we got our first real taste of diving in tropical waters. Three dives in all spread across the reef during the day, although having said that there was squally rain throughout despite it being very warm.

From the moment of entering the water at the 3 Sisters site we were surrounded by white tipped reef sharks, a small shark less that 1.5m long but an incredible first experience for us novices diving with sharks. Plenty more to see too during the course of a simple square profile dive to view fantastic multi coloured corals, concealing scores of lionfish amongst Christmas tree worms and huge sea cucumbers. Our second dive followed within the hour at Nursery Bommie where shoals of barracuda amassed amongst fluorescent yellow and blue trumpetfish, huge rainbow wrasse and coral trout. The last dive after lunch was a drift dive known as Phils where morays and parrotfish where a plenty along with the ever attendant reef sharks. Average visibility during all dives at Agincourt was at least 25 metres and not for the first time we realised how deceptively comforting that view to the sunlit surface could appear should anything go awry.

After such a fantastic day, perhaps not surprisingly we were easily persuaded to take advantage of a half price deal to go out again and this time our option was to go out on the Silverswift, a slightly smaller boat from Cairns two days later to dive at Flyn, Miller and Pellow reefs respectively. Being a smaller boat the majority of the passengers were divers rather than snorkellers but we were still less than 12 shared amongst half that many instructors. Once again the visibility was in the order of 25+ metres. Still plenty of beautiful corals and myriad shoals of fish to see but the real attraction amongst many were the giant clams, over 1m across in many cases, or as one wag had it ‘all the sea food you could never eat’ - fantastically colourful with a deep blue interior and simply out of this world.