I have a photograph from my first Whitsundays sailing trip that I’ve never managed to adequately explain to people who weren’t there. It was taken at anchor in a bay on the south coast of Hook Island, on the third…
The first time I drift dived a channel pass, I forgot to kick. This sounds like a small thing. For a diver trained to be active in the water — to fin constantly, to fight current when it pushed me…
The outer reef begins to change long before the sun actually reaches the horizon. During the middle of the day the sea often feels energetic. Boats move between dive sites, wind ripples the water surface, and the bright overhead sun…
Reef photography travel presents a specific version of a universal problem: the gap between what you see and what your camera records. In almost any other landscape, the gap is manageable — daylight, stable platforms, and subjects that don’t move…
The most expensive liveaboard I’ve ever been on was not the best liveaboard I’ve ever been on. The best liveaboard I’ve ever been on was a mid-range vessel out of Cairns with twelve guest berths, a dive guide who had…
Night snorkelling is the reef experience most people don’t know they can have. Scuba divers talk about night diving as if it’s an advanced activity requiring significant training and nerve. Snorkelling at night is considerably more accessible than that —…
Most Australians have never heard of the Coral Sea Islands Territory, which is understandable — it has no permanent population, no tourist infrastructure, no accommodation, and no way to visit it except on a liveaboard or a vessel capable of…
The paddle dips into flat water at 6am and the sound it makes is the only sound. There’s no wind yet. The reef crest is twenty metres to my left, visible as a line of slight turbulence where the lagoon’s…
The best sleep I ever had near the Great Barrier Reef was in a tent on a coral cay in the Bunker Group, 80 kilometres off the Queensland coast, with the sound of shearwaters returning to their burrows and the…
Coral gardens often become the places travelers remember most clearly after visiting a reef. These sections of the reef are usually neither the shallowest flats nor the deepest slopes. Instead they occupy the middle ground where coral colonies grow closely…