The swimming pool sessions are primarily for familiarisation with the equipment, and practicing of safety drills. The first time you suit up, you might feel like an extra from Robocop, but it's not as complicated as it looks. Your dials show depth, dive time, and remaining air. You have a BCD (Buoyancy Control Device) which is…ahem…a device which controls your buoyancy, and two regulators – one for breathing through and one for backup. You will also have a weight belt and obviously a mask, but these hopefully do not require any explanation! In the pool, we repeatedly practiced a variety of skills until they were second nature. These included a selection of hand signals, mask clearing, removal of and putting on equipment, and safety procedures including regulator sharing. Australian dive schools have a reputation for being extremely safety conscious, nowhere more so than in Queensland. Before each dive, every diver went through a 5-point safety check, and then performed the exact same check on his or her dive buddy.

Eventually we got to the boat, chugged our way to the reef, and the fun began. While there were still some training skills to be performed, we could now start to enjoy our surroundings, and once certified, we were diving purely for fun! It's a ridiculously over-used cliché to say that it's 'another world' down there, but it is difficult to think of a better description for an environment where 'normal' rules of sound, light, movement, and even gravity do not apply.

Light is distorted to make everything seem larger/closer, by about 33% – bear this in mind the next time a diver tells you a ten-foot manta ray swam right up to him! The colours you will see underwater are breathtaking. There are fish of every colour in the rainbow living on the reef. Not only that, but they are of such bright, vibrant, almost glowing hues, they can seem unreal, perhaps like cartoons or neon signs. Accustomed to the pastel colours of life above sea level, we simply do not expect such a vibrant display when we take the plunge. Because sound travels differently under water, you will find your ears are of little use. To begin with, everything sounds louder. Even the bubbles generated when you exhale will sound like a drum-roll until you get used to it. Secondly, it is practically impossible to tell where a sound is coming from. If you hear a humming noise “daaaa dum daaaaa dum daaaa dum” you can obviously be certain it is a shark playing tricks with you, but you will have no idea which direction he is coming from. Moving around underwater, the main difference is that you move in three dimensions. Ok, I know we already exist in three dimensions above ground, but realistically, if you are walking along a footpath, you are effectively moving in two dimensions, forwards/backwards and left/right. Underwater, you also need to look above a
nd below you. Apart from the safety concerns (other divers do not like being kicked in the head), you never know what you might miss. While the piece of coral in front of you might be very interesting, maybe you should look down and see the school of fish winding their way around your feet! These differences can make scuba diving a disorientating experience, and if you have claustrophobic tendencies then maybe scuba diving is not for you. The enhanced sound and vision, the mask, and the underwater caves, may not be everybody's school of plankton.

If you think ordinary scuba diving might be a new experience, wait until you try your first night dive! The route for our night dive was one we were relatively familiar with, and had been explained to us before we set off. Within a couple of minutes, I was completely disorientated. Your normal points of reference disappear. The only direction you can be sure of is 'up', and that's purely by watching your bubbles. All divers in our group had torches, but torches do no operate under water the way they do above. Above water, there is a ‘light dispersal’ effect. The beam of light from a torch spreads out and covers a relatively wide area. Beneath the surface, the beam of light barely spreads beyond the width of the torch. There were 10 divers in our group, each with their own torch, and at times the scene looked like a midnight battle between 10 Jedi, armed with light sabres. Night diving has its own attractions though. At night, everyone comes out to feed on someone else. Fish also have a strange habit of swimming towards torchlight and you can often see tiny fish head-butting your torch! You can also scare the wits out of your dive buddy by holding your torch in front of their forehead and shining the light in the face of a hungry shark (again, don't try this in reality).

While we did not see a shark ourselves, we were lucky enough to encounter a 6ft turtle on our night dive. Turtles have always struck me as weird looking creatures, hardly suited to graceful underwater movement. They seem to be permanently in a daze, as though they have just swum back from a 'herb exhibition' in Amsterdam. The turtle we encountered seemed distinctly unimpressed with our presence, and ignored us until eventually getting tired of our lights and meandering off into the back of an underwater cave.

So what do you do on the boat, when you're not diving? Firstly, all food was provided (this is the norm), and eating was one of the main pastimes. All the fresh sea air and good healthy exercise do wonders for the appetite. As the boats are not particularly large, there is little else to do, but nobody seems to mind. Books and diary-writing occupied most of the spare time, once the stomach rituals were complete. Officially, alcohol and diving do not mix. If you take any alcohol during the day then that's it – you don't dive until next morning. Despite the fact that alcohol and diving do not mix (I think if I say it often enough, I can't be sued for what I say next), there are few pleasures that compare with sitting out on deck enjoying a cold beer, watching the sun set on a peaceful Pacific Ocean, swapping stories about 'the one that got away'. Just don't let on I told you that. There is also the unique attraction of being completely cut off from the world. Obviously for safety reasons, the boat is always in radio communication with base or coastguards. Aside from that, while you are on the reef, your mobile phone has no signal. There are no TV or radio stations. You have absolutely no idea what is going on back on 'the mainland'. Depending on what you want, this can either be freaky or relieving. For me, it was the ultimate in 'getting away from it all'. Nice food, excellent weather, great diving, and a fun group of like-minded people. At the end of it all, you have the sense of having actually achieved something, and not simply darkened your skin colour by a few shades. Honestly, what more could you ask for from a holiday?