The first time I hovered above a carpet anemone on the Great Barrier Reef, I was convinced I was witnessing something rehearsed. A pair of orange-and-white clownfish darted in and out of the swaying tentacles with the confidence of animals…
The Great Barrier Reef is not difficult to get to from Australia. From everywhere else, it requires some planning, but the infrastructure is well-developed, the connections are numerous, and the logistics, once understood, are more straightforward than the destination’s remoteness…
Lord Howe Island is the sort of place that makes you reconsider everything you thought you knew about island destinations. I arrived expecting good snorkelling and ended up rethinking my entire understanding of what a pristine ocean environment looks like.…
Most visitors first see the Great Barrier Reef in the middle of the day. Tour boats arrive from the mainland, snorkelers gather along floating platforms, and the water surface is usually textured by wind. It can still be a remarkable…
Reef slopes are among the most interesting places to observe marine life, yet many visitors only pass over them briefly. From the surface these areas appear as darker sections of water where the reef suddenly descends toward deeper ocean. Snorkelers…
Evenings on small reef islands arrive almost unnoticed. The transition from afternoon to sunset happens gradually, often beginning with a subtle change in the light reflecting across the lagoon. During the middle of the day the sun stands high above…
The Wet Tropics of Queensland covers about 900,000 hectares of rainforest along the northeastern coast between Cooktown and Townsville, and it is older than the Amazon. That sentence sounds like a promotional claim. It isn’t. The Wet Tropics contains plant…
The worst thing that ever happened to my diving was getting a camera. I don’t mean that entirely seriously, but I mean it more than half seriously. Before the camera, I was a diver. I moved through the reef, I…
My most experienced dive buddy once told me that the most boring-looking dive sites in the world contain the most interesting things in it. I thought he was winding me up. Then he took me muck diving in Lembeh Strait,…
The Maldives is one of the most written-about reef destinations on Earth and also one of the most consistently misrepresented. The promotional version — overwater bungalows, turquoise shallows, photogenic isolation — is real in the sense that those things exist.…