Dan's Adventure

After getting hooked on diving in Asia, my plans for Australia rapidly transformed to the point that the majority of my time in Australia would be spent underwater in the Great Barrier Reef. As the only living thing visible from space, and longer than the Great Wall of China, the Great Barrier Reef is massive. It is possible to visit parts of the reef from almost every coastal town in Queensland.

There are several options for visiting the Great Barrier Reef, depending on how much of it you want to see and how much money you have to spend. Cairns is where most people visit the Great Barrier Reef from due to its close proximity to fantastic dive sites. Day trips are offered by numerous companies, all of which take snorkellers, certified divers and those who are diving for the very first time. Most of the boats are used only for transport, with the diving and snorkelling taking place from permanently moored pontoons in reefs close to Cairns. This leads to there being a lot of people on each of the day trips from Cairns, resulting in the reefs that they visit no longer being in pristine condition.

Some day boats do go further afield, and take a far smaller number of people out to reefs that are still in good shape. I travelled up to Port Douglas to join the Poseidon on a trip out to the Agincourt reef where I did 3 dives and was blown away by what I saw. An abundance of fish, both large and small, colourful soft and hard corals, and only a few other divers in the water. There are only two day boats that go as far out as Agincourt, Poseidon and Silversonic, and both are based in Port Douglas.

The Agincourt reef was impressive, but it was nothing compared to the dive sites to come. The further north you go, the better the condition of the reef, but due to the distance of the northern reefs, it is not possible to visit them on day trips. You need to go overnight. This kind of dive trip is known as a live aboard. You spend several days and nights on a boat, visiting various dive sites and essentially doing nothing but eating, sleeping and diving. This kind of trip costs a fair bit more than your average day trip, but probably not as much as you would think. Close to the departure dates, all of the companies offering live aboards make any remaining places available at stand by rates which are typically half price. If you make a booking through one of the many travel agencies in Cairns, chances are you will get it for even less so it definitely pays to wait until the last minute and to shop around for the best price.

From Cairns, there are three boats that are highly recommended for live aboard dive trips. They are Mike Ball’s Spoilsport, the Spirit of Freedom and Taka. They all make weekly trips to the Cod Hole in the northern Great Barrier Reef and to Osprey Reef in the coral sea. Each boat leaves on a different day of the week so it is unlikely that you will see any other dive boats whilst on a live aboard. Another option for a live aboard of sorts is offered by a number of dive companies that own pontoons near Cairns. The pontoons have sleeping quarters allowing guests to stay overnight before being transported to another pontoon the next day. The pontoons are not however very far apart, just at different dive sites within the same reefs. This option is a lot cheaper than one of the real live aboards as it is essentially just a floating hotel.

I decided to join Taka on a 4 day/3 night trip to the Cod Hole in the northern Great Barrier Reef. We set sail on Tuesday evening with the intention of reaching Cod Hole overnight with the first dive there early on Wednesday morning. When the morning arrived we weren’t at Cod Hole. The Skipper had deemed the conditions too rough to reach it safely, so we were moored up at Vertical Garden on ribbon reef 9. Although we were all rather disappointed to be missing Cod Hole which had been billed as the highlight of the trip due to the feeding of the giant potato cod, we were ecstatic when we emerged from our first dive – the sea may have been choppy and there may have been a bit of current, but the fish were out in force. For the next 3 days we continued to dive some spectacular dive sites, with highlights being Pixie Pinnacle, Pixie Wall and Steve’s Bommie. Each night we did a night dive and twice we did drift dives where we jumped in at one end of a wall and got picked up at the other end. We were only really supposed to do a drift dive once, but my dive buddy and I got a bit confused by the dive plan on one dive and ended up getting whisked around a corner by the current and having to pop up the safety sausage when we surfaced in order to get picked up as we had ended up at the other side of the reef. We were so far away that the camera guy couldn’t focus on us when he zoomed right in. The girl that came out in the tender to pick us up wasn’t impressed, but we still had a nice dive.

After almost a week of diving from Cairns, I started to head south and had to make a stop for one more day of diving. The Yongala sank in 1911 and was left undiscovered for close to 50 years following that. Lying at a depth of 30 metres and over 100 metres in length, the Yongala is reputed as being one of the world’s best dive sites, so I couldn’t let the opportunity to dive it pass me by. There are dive operators in both Townsville and Ayr that do day trips out to the Yongala wreck. I chose to dive from Ayr because it is a lot closer to the dive site, taking only twenty minutes by boat to reach it. As I made my descent down the buoy line, I was amazed by how much life there was around the wreck. Before diving the Yongala I wasn’t sure what to expect, I guess I thought I would be able to see the shape of the boat, but at times it was difficult due to the amount of soft coral growing all over it. As a result of there being no other reefs near by, the Yongala attracts a huge amount of life, it is teeming with fish. Giant turtles call the wreck home, and sharks cruise around feasting on the smaller shoals of fish that surround you as you swim by. It truly is a fantastic dive site.

If you get the opportunity, I thoroughly recommend diving somewhere in the Great Barrier Reef. Although you can see a lot when snorkelling, it just isn’t the same as being deep underwater, being surrounded by fish and having large predators passing by you. The Great Barrier Reef is home to some of the world’s best dive sites and when you book through travel agencies it really doesn’t cost that much to go diving.