We stayed in Byron Bay for a few days and we were parked next to another couple in a beat up old van from the UK who had sold all their possessions to come to “Oz” and chill out. I also remember the dives we did at Noosa Heads with Noosa Bluewater, another friendly dive center, it was on one of our dives here that we filmed a Leopard Shark taking a rest. On another dive at the “Pinnacle” we saw a huge shoal of “Butter Bream” ???? the video footage is great to watch, Janet swimming in and out of the fantastic shoal of fish, it was excellent diving.
Onward to Airlie Beach in the Whitsundays, an idylic place to stay, the town is touristy, but a lovely place.  It was here that we met the "Barefoot Bushman" Rob Bredl at his Zoo, Rob has made countless documentaries for TV, it was at his Zoo and shown on one of those documentaries that his niece was attacked by a large Croc and thrown about like a rag doll, she was severely savaged and allmost died from her injuries. 
Rob calls his zoo a DOO ZOO as opposed to a "dont do" zoo, as he say's, most other zoo's are full of sign's that say "dont do this " "dont do that"..............Robs zoo is what i would describe as "open plan", yes the Croc's were confined.
Our next diving was done from “Oceania”, based in Airlie Beach, a large aluminium twin hull boat that had 30 guests on board, it was a state of the art boat with all the go faster bits you could think of, the crew were excellent, it was aboard this boat that we experienced the best dive and boat safety talk i have ever had, it was very reasuring. 
We had three nights on the Barrier Reef aboard Oceania, sadly, the boat was catering for divers taking their open water courses, the student divers were great guy’s and gal’s , (we were open water students once), but to come from the UK, book a liveaboard on the Barrier Reef and find you were moored in the same spot for 3 days and 3 nights where the Coral had been kicked to death was to say the least, dissapointing. 
We did complain to the crew about this but they just shrugged their shoulder's and said where they moored was allways the captains decison, i can accept that in the case of rough weather etc, we all knew why though.  So allthough the staff were very good, the food and accommodation was excellent, the boat was clean and tidy we shall not be going diving from Oceania again.
We arrived in Townsville on a Saturday afternoon, we had learn't by now that everything shuts down for the weekend on Saturday's, so we hung around till the dive shops opened up again, We were trying to get a dive on the wreck “Yongala” but this was proving difficult, none of them appeared interested in "experienced" divers, they were all looking for open water students they could sell courses to, so we gave up and headed for Cairns.

We arrived in Cairns mid afternoon and decided to carry on north to Port Douglas, about 50 - 60 miles up the Captain Cook Highway, we parked up for the night right on the beach and in amongst the trees, the following morning we drove back down to Cairns and looked for somewhere to stay for the last couple days before we handed back the camper van. While in Cairns we stayed at the Coconut Palms Resort, one of the best camper sites we had found on our travels. The camper van was due to go back to Britz the day after we arrived in Cairns so we treated ourselves to a luxury chalet, after three weeks in a sleeping bag in a camper van we thought we deserved a little pampering.

At the end of our mammoth drive we  had a few days rest before we boarded Aquarius III in Cairns, this was a much smaller boat, there were about 8 guests on this trip out to the Coral Sea, we had seven fantastic nights diving the reef's of Holmes and Bouganville to name just two. I forget the name of the skipper, but Mick cooked our food, Tim was the deckhand who caught most of the fish we ate and Gerald was our guide.