Our kind Melbourne host, Mark, had a brilliant idea for escaping the city heat: let’s spend the day underwater. What a stroke of genius!

He drove us to Mornington, a seaside town with a pier that is a well regarded starting point for shore-based dives. Unfortunately, the busy dive shop could only rent us full scuba gear for the morning and so the afternoon would have to be spent snorkelling on the surface instead. No matter, the cold Antarctic Ocean would provide us with some relief from the immensely hot air, if only for an hour or two before we all passed into the opposite extreme of hypothermia!

Our scuba dive was quite a good one. Whilst we were all hopeless at reading our underwater compasses, were improperly weighted (think: astronauts doing weightless cartwheels) and I couldn’t see a bloody thing though my misty mask which had obviously taken a cheeky health spa steam-bath treatment just prior to attaching itself my hot face, we dived without instructors for the first time and it felt rather independent and quite adventurous. The others saw a really, really big sting ray — I thought it was a big, flat rock to stand on until I “saw” the tail. Out of time, we didn’t make it as far as the pier, as planned, and so had to make a less graceful exit from the rocks. Squiffy lost a snorkel en-route and I lost a fin-clip-thingo, and later realised that my snorkel had also escaped, presumably to meet Squiffy’s for a secret underwater rendezvous. A bit embarrassing, as we had both assured Mark that we were perfectly capable sports divers!

The afternoon’s snorkelling was good, although much more like surface swimming than we desired. Due to the remarkable buoyancy of our thick wetsuits, none of us could dive more than a couple of inches underwater to see the good stuff on the seabed. Imagine the chuckles that we must have illicited from the pier-based fisherman. Luckily for us, there was a somewhat temperature-insensitive local gent diving sans-wetsuit who was able to point out the well camouflaged leafy sea-dragons for us neoprene surface-dwellers to see.

Thanks a lot to Mark and the apparently nerve-damaged local for a lovely day underwater and out of the claws of the deeply maddening sun.

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