The day started bright and earlyish, as usual.  We’d booked yet another cruise/tour for today and it left at 8:30 from the Cairns Wharf.  This is only 6km away so no big hurry was needed.

The cruise was set to take us out to Green Island for a few hours and then take us to a pontoon on the Great Barrier Reef for another few hours before taking us back to Cairns at 5:30.  A bit of a full-on day.  Three boat rides with plenty of activities in between tired us all out.  Some more than others.

After about an hour on the boat we arrived at Green Island.  The cruise was uneventful on this big catamaran.  It flies along at 50 kmh and there’s very little rock ‘n’ roll to contend with.  The boat wasn’t full, but we wouldn’t have wanted any more on board either.  Lots of Japanese tourists, and they are well catered for too, most signs and brochures are also available in Japanese and many of the crew spoke it as well.

On the way over, we had arranged for the kids to have a parasail.  This was mostly to get them out of our hair so we could enjoy Green Island a little bit by ourselves … and our closest 200 tourist mates.  But that was the plan that was …

While they were off galavanting around the skies, Kel & I decided to have a walk around the island.  The circumnavigation is supposed to take about 45 minutes, but we managed it in 25.

Nice scenery though.

Kel gazing off into the distance, wishing that the parasail rope would break

At 11:30 our boat returned to pick us up and take us out to the outer reef pontoon.  Once we got there the first thing on the agenda was to take the semi-submersible ride and then have some lunch.

As always, the underwater photos manage to lose all the color and vibrance that the naked eye picks up.

After a quick buffet lunch, we kitted up in the snorkeling gear and dived in.  There was plenty to see and the clarity of the water (to about 20m) made the seeing easy.  During the boat ride over, and again in the semi-submersible, the various varieties of fish and coral had been pointed out to us in a way that made it fairly easy to remember what they all were.  This made the snorkelling much more enjoyable, as we knew (most) of what we were looking at.

There’s a huge resident Maori Wrasse that hangs around the area and is quite friendly.  Both Blake and Hannah managed to score a pat with ‘Wally’.  He makes it his business to pay everybody a visit.

Managed to snag a very well hidden geocache right near the car on our way back too.  This one was hidden INSIDE a hollow bolt inside a sculpture.  One for the books thats for sure.

Dinner was BBQ hamburgers followed by some TV, Skype and blog.  Yet another big day tomorrow, potentially, so fairly early to bed.

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