The boat ride from Bali’s southern coast to Nusa Lembongan takes somewhere between 45 minutes and two hours, depending on which operator you use and how the Badung Strait decides to behave that morning. Most people book these reef cruises…
A Red Sea yacht cruise with snorkeling isn’t quite what the booking photos suggest. The water is genuinely clear – that part isn’t marketing. But clarity and what you actually see are two different things, and the experience shifts dramatically…
The first time you see a reef pontoon from the water, the cognitive dissonance is real. You’re 70 kilometres from the nearest town, surrounded by the Coral Sea, and there in front of you is what appears to be a…
The Whitsundays sit off the Queensland coast like a scattered handful of islands, 74 of them in total, most uninhabited and accessible only by water. A seven-night small-ship cruise through this region means anchoring at seven different spots across the…
The Kimberley is not a reef destination in the conventional sense. There are no coral gardens, no tropical fish in saturated colour, no cleaning stations with mantas hovering above them. What there is — in quantities that are difficult to…
The thing that surprises most people about their first liveaboard is how quickly the boat becomes home. Not immediately. The first afternoon, you’re navigating a new space with too many strangers in it, figuring out where your wetsuit goes and…
Papua New Guinea is the destination that experienced Australian divers mention when they want to talk about the best diving they’ve ever done. Not everyone agrees on the specific sites — PNG is a large country with an extraordinary variety…
The first time I dived in Raja Ampat, I surfaced after the second dive of the first day, looked at my buddy, and said nothing for about a minute. There was nothing useful to say. We had just come up…
Not everyone who visits the Great Barrier Reef comes to dive. Not everyone comes primarily for the reef at all. Queensland’s coastal tourism has, over the past two decades, developed a category of cruise product that sits between the dive…
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…