My daughter saw her first sea turtle when she was four years old. We were snorkelling in the lagoon at Lady Elliot Island — she was in a child’s wetsuit and a mask that had taken three attempts to fit…
The Red Sea often surprises travelers who associate coral reefs only with tropical islands. Along large stretches of coastline in Egypt, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia, the reef begins directly offshore. From the beach the water may appear dark and empty,…
There is a specific protocol for swimming with a whale shark that every operator will brief you on before you enter the water, and one of the rules is: no touching. This rule exists for conservation reasons — human contact…
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 —…
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…
Shallow reef lagoons rarely attract the same attention as dramatic outer reef walls. Divers often prefer steep coral slopes where large fish move through deeper water, and photographers gravitate toward brightly colored coral gardens along reef edges. Lagoons, by comparison,…
There’s a specific kind of frustration that snorkellers describe when they’ve been on a reef and feel like they missed something — that the guide pointed at something, or another snorkeller in the group surfaced talking excitedly about what they…
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…
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…
I want to tell you about a section of reef that I have watched change over twelve years of repeat visits, because it’s the clearest example I know of how individual snorkeller behaviour, multiplied across thousands of visits, produces a…