The Cod Hole has a reputation that precedes it by decades, and in my experience, it earns every bit of that reputation on every single dive. The site is a section of Ribbon Reef No. 10, the northernmost of the…
I spent an entire dive once watching a hawksbill turtle eat a sponge. This sounds like it might be a dull dive. It wasn’t. The turtle worked methodically along a section of reef wall, using its narrow, pointed beak to…
The first thing I usually notice on the Great Barrier Reef in the early morning is the silence. Boats have not started moving yet, the wind has not built across the water, and the reef often feels suspended between night…
The first seahorse I ever found underwater, I almost missed. My dive guide — a young Indonesian woman named Dewi, with the kind of eyes that see things other people don’t — stopped above a sea fan, hovered for a…
Lizard Island is the northernmost island resort on the Great Barrier Reef, 240 kilometres north of Cairns, and it occupies a position in Australian reef travel that is difficult to categorise accurately. It’s a luxury resort — unambiguously, unapologetically upmarket,…
Townsville is the largest city in North Queensland and the most underrated reef destination in Australia. I say this knowing that it will strike most people who’ve been to Cairns as a puzzling claim. Cairns has the infrastructure, the international…
The first time I put a snorkel mask on, I was seven years old, standing in a swimming pool in Brisbane, and I kept lifting my head out of the water every twenty seconds because I didn’t quite believe the…
There are places that require some effort to reach, and then there are places that require the kind of effort that filters out everyone who isn’t genuinely committed. The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are the second type. Two and a half…
Not all Great Barrier Reef snorkelling is equal. This seems obvious when stated plainly, but it’s a point worth making explicitly, because the promotional shorthand — “snorkel the Great Barrier Reef!” — treats a 2,300-kilometre reef system as if it’s…
This is the guide I wish had existed when I first started planning reef trips. It doesn’t replace the detailed articles elsewhere on this site — the specific dive site guides, the island articles, the seasonal timing breakdowns — but…