February 23 - Australia: Cairns, Queensland

For the last morning, we woke up early by the darn anchor.  

I felt like absolute crap.  The past few days have obviously caught up with me and I'm paying the price now.  At any rate, I just want to get off the boat and get home as soon as possible.  After breakfast and checking out of our rooms, we went to the bow and took some group photos.

The Divers

From L to R (back row): Alberto, Yolanda, Steve, Gordon, Malta, Heidi, Karl

Front row: Dan, Jon, Bob, Brigida, Arthur, Jana

The Nimrod Crew

From L to R: Ambrose, Ian, Nao, Demi, Jenny, Sellah, John

Around 8:30, we all loaded into the tender and road to Lizard Island.  There, we hung out in the shade of the "Marlin Bar" until our plane arrived.  We walked up the road to the landing strip and waited in "airport" for the plane.  The "airport" was just a hut on the side of a small landing strip. 

The Lizard Island Airport

So we waited for the planes to arrive.  After the two planes landed, we watched the next group of passengers deplane and walk across the landing strip.  This must be a small world, because Elli from our IDC course walked off the plane.  John - the instructor on the Nimrod - is one of her housemates so she decided to take advantage of their last-minute rate just as we did.

Our Little Six-Seater Plane

The plane was a little six-seater, on which Jon managed to finagle the co-pilot's seat.  Perfect for his photos of the reef.  The hour long plane trip was a low-altitude flight that took us over all the ribbon reefs and along the coast of Queensland.  Jon sat up front and went nuts with both cameras.  It was a lovely flight, and some spectacular views.

A Sample of the View From The Plane

We were home by 12:00.  I went straight to bed and didn't get up again until 5:00.

Jon had run some errands and got our film developed.  He also had the pictures put on CD so we could upload them, and that's why there are such lovely pictures of our underwater adventures.  After looking at the pictures, it's pretty obvious that I could benefit from an underwater photographry course.  The pictures I took are pretty terrible!  But they were all fun to look at.