After beeing in Cairns for some days I decided to do a four day diving trip to the famous cod hole. The cod hole is located north of Cairns. I took us from 5 p.m to the next morning at 8 till we arrived at challenger bay, our first diving site. I got a book about nudibranchs from Jules our videographer that nite and got instantly hooked. Those creatures can't be real I thought - but more about that later.

We got a nice map about the reef as you see. Nathan my divebuddy from scottland and I went down.

Beeing my first divetrip with a camera I had to do some pictures of corals and featherstars.

Diagonal lined sweetlips were beeing cleaned at that cleaning station.

This is an almost grownup teira batfish. They change their gender while growing old. First they are women and then the change to males. Hmmmm... probably shouldn't mention that :v)

On our trip to the next dive some dolphins joined us.

The second divelocation was the famous cod hole. John always made nice little sketches of our dive sites.

Pamela did her naturalist dive when she was beeing checked out by a potato cod. As you see the wrote instantly down that she had seen a potato cod. The cod wanted to be patted though.

Some more pictures of coral reef structures.

As some pictures of Nathan

That's me just before going down the next dive when they started the cod feed.

The cod feed:

Jules doing some pictures of us during the cod feed.

One potato cod got interested in me as well.

Clam gardens was Nat's and my navigational dive. But as it was just below the boat at about 25m we didn't have enough air left to see anything.

Steves bommie is the only coral reef within the next few kilometers. So all live that's around stays around the bommie. John during his briefing on the reef.

Soft corals and see star. The depth of the see star is about 20 meters. That's why it's that red. You don't see red in that depth and it uses this colour as camouflage.

I saw my first red lion fish.

As shown in the briefing we saw red and black anemone fish.

Beer garden is called beer garden, cause you can have a beer at night afterwards.

The dive started at sunset, so we still had some light left when Nat took a picture of a large clam.

We saw a rare species of ragged lion fish (pterois antennata) and more red and blackanemone fish as well.

Coral and lemon damsel fish ( 5cm ).

Christmas tree worms (2-4cm) and a roboastra gracilis nudibranch (2 cm). They defenitly are the bizarre creatures. It has tentacles on top of the body are the gills.

We had perfect weather the whole time. Looking up from a depth of about 12 meters.

More christmas tree worms,soft corals and sea urchins.

Spinecheek anenome fish.

Groupers have red eyes when using a flash.

On whip corals live very small gobies. (1-2 cm)

Find the flatworm on the next picture. ( its white and in the upper left corner ).

And on the last dive more nudibranchs- yeepie ! The green one Notodoris minor is the biggest I've seen so far, about 9 cm long. The blue one pseudocerus bifurcus - my favourite - is just about 1.5 cm long and a flatworm in fact.

John doing his naturalist dive.

Pam, John and me at the end of the trip.