Cairns – Snorkel, Dive & Cruise the Great Barrier (Australia)

Today was the start of our three-day diving cruise to the Great Barrier Reef with Pro Dive Cairns.

Check In at Pro Dives Cairns

In the early morning we were picked up at just after 6 o’clock in front of our hotel and driven to the shop of Pro Dive Cairns. In the shop we had to do a few formalities, choose our equipment and then we went to the harbour, where we made our way to the Great Barrier Reef at around 7 o’clock in the morning.

Description & Price of the Diving Cruise

Our 3-day program is described as follows:

The dive cruise we had already booked at home via FTI, because the offer was really great: 3 days/2 nights on board a ship including meals and 11 dives for 425 euros per person. A total of 32 passengers and 8 crew members were on board. A good 75 of the passengers have taken a diving course on board – a normal “open water” diving course or an advanced course. We both just wanted to go diving without taking another course – so we could relax in between while the others sat in front of their textbooks.

The dive ship “Scubapro III”

The boat was built in 2004, is 24 meters long, 7 meters wide and can accommodate 32 passengers. On our boat “Scubapro III” the passengers were accommodated in cabins of two, which were spread over three decks. On the middle deck there was a large lounge where cooking, eating and learning was done.

The dives on the Great Barrier Reef

A total of 11 dives were ahead of us, including two exciting night dives. Half an hour before each dive we were briefed in detail with the help of a table sketch of the respective dive site. That is, where we will dive, how we navigate there and what we can see where best.

And then it started: wetsuit on, check and put on equipment, turn up bottle and into the water. What was special for us: we didn’t have a guide with us for the first time while diving. The first dive was still done, but from then on we were on our own. But we did very well, didn’t lose our orientation and saw great things underwater every time: reef sharks, turtles, stingrays, moray eels and lots of reef fish. The corals were very beautiful and had great different shapes.

The highlights were certainly a large group of “Green Bumphead Parrotfish”, who started slowly at 7 o’clock in the morning and the giant tortoise “Bryan”, which we saw sleeping in the cave during our night dive…

At noon on Saturday we made our way back to Cairns and were back at the harbour around 4pm. It was a really nice diving cruise and a great experience, because we hadn’t done anything like this before.

The group of our diving cruise

Videos of our dives on the Great Barrier Reef

We made videos of diving with our GoPro every 3 days.

That was almost 4 weeks in Australia for us now. From tomorrow, a completely new chapter of our world tour begins – we will continue to Japan 🙂

All travelogues from Australia (2015)