Scuba Diving The Great Barrier Reef!

This past week Sarah and I took part in a 5 day learn to dive scuba course in Cairns Australia. I had been wanting to do some scuba diving since the day we booked our flights. Sarah was a bit apprehensive due to a slight fear of fishy's. In the end we both decided that we couldn't go to Australia let alone the Great Barrier Reef and not do some serious scuba diving.
So the 5 day learn to dive course began with 2 days learning about diving by watching movies, doing scuba practice in a pool and some minimal book work. We were in a class of about 7 people us included. We had an incredible instructor who not only had us completly intertained the entire course but was also extremely knowledgeable about the sport...which was comforting for both of us. The first two days were long but fun and we learned alot. After our 2 classroom days we were ready to head out to the GB Reef. We left early last sunday morning. We had to ride a transporter boat out to where the boat we would be staying over night at for the next 3 days. The water was choppy and a bit uninviting in both our eyes...not to blue...a bit stirred up and windy outside. With in the first 20 minutes of the 2 hour commute, my little buddy Sarah begun to feel a little woooozzzyyy. She lost her cookies and all was good, but I'm sure that didn't make here feel all that hot about staying on a live aboard vessel for 3 days. Never the less once we arrive at the final destination "The Kangaroo Explorer" the water was as blue as imaginable, the wind died down, and we were all anxious to get our toes wet! We were given a tour by our instructor Ethan. Sarah and I shared a spacious room with our own bathroom. Shortly after we got situated on the boat we jumped in for our first dive. I was so excited to see the new world which we had never explored before. On our first dive we went in and practiced some of our certification skills at the bottom of the ocean. We also saw a GIANT clam. We had to do 5 certification dives with our instructor in order to get the SSI certification. The 5th dive was our cert dive....so we all wore come silly little costumes down while we dove and the camera man that they have on board videoed us getting handed our certification cards...right on the bottom of the ocean floor. We bought a video of this entire thing so you can all see that later on! The next dives we were on our own. So literally Sarah and I jumped off the boat gave our safty signal to the watch guard and under we went. About 30 minutes later I signaled Sarah...thinking maybe we should surface to see where were at...being that neither of us had any sense of direction once submerged what so ever. When we came up we were shocked with how far from the boat we were. So we swam back...slowly...and it took a while. The next dives we went with a group of other people, which made me feel much more comfortable. We also did 2 early morning dives and a night dive. Both those dives give you a completly different perspective of the under water world. We met alot of other people on the boat and enjoyed talking to all the other experienced staff members. We went on a totall of 10 dives and had the time of our lives! We saw sharks, turtles, giant clams, LOADS of coral, a sting ray, and millions of gorgeous, bright colored fish! Were hoping to dive again somewhere along the White Sunday Islands in the near future.