The Great Barrier Reef

Today I got to live one of the top ten on my Bucket List. Snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef. It was just as wonderful as I imagined it – or maybe I should say, remembered it. I remember the Reef from when I was a little girl and we used to watch Jacques Cousteau and his television movies from the Great Barrier Reef. That’s how the Reef got on my top ten. Guess what the name was of the boat I sailed on today? The Calypso. Ah huh.

The Calypso is a lovely, fast catamaran that is able to go to the outer reef, so that’s where we were! We visited three different sites in the Opal / Agincourt Reef area. The first two were in quite fair weather. The highlight of the first site was the clams - some as big across when open as my dining room tale. Really giant. And a few years old too. There were also plenty of smaller clams (maybe the size of a dinner plate) and they were even more colourful and active. Closer to the surface than the giants, they would snap shut when you passed overhead. They were very fleshy, and often purple or blue. There were also a fair amount of fish and the hard coral was spectacular. Not a shark in sight, nor did we encounter any stingers, although it is still technically stinger season and we were required to wear lycra suits. So flattering to the middle-age form...

At our second site, the soft coral was definitely the highlight. Fabulous large sea anemone (yes I did find Nemo; he was right there in the anemone where he was supposed to be). The water was beautifully clear and the coral close enough to the surface that you could actually see the tiny polyps opening, closing and waving as they filter the water for microorganisms. This is actually me holding a sea cucumber of unusual size. The marine biologist on crew brought it to the surface – it is the most startling bright orange you can imagine!

By the time we got to the third site in the afternoon it was raining quite hard, and I wasn’t even sure we’d be able to go out, but as you might suspect, the biggest danger of snorkelling in the rain is that you might get wet. Duh. And what a bonus that third site was! This was by far the most beautiful, it had all the incredible colourful hard and soft coral and it was just teaming with fish. Every colour, shape and appendage you could imagine. I would float over one spot for as long as possible because there was so much to see; my mind couldn’t process everything I was seeing. I’d just watch one spot and see more and more species appear – they were there all along, but I couldn’t register everything all at once so the different objects would appear as I was able to take more in. Every coral of whatever colour (mostly blues, purples and pinks, but also yellow and green) would be host to any number of small fish that took on the colour and sometimes even the shape of the coral with which it resides. I guess if you have had a few million years to adapt you get pretty good at it. Remind me to stop wearing grey or black to the office.

And as an added bonus, I wasn’t even sea sick. (Thank you Gravol; thank you wrist belts; thank you catamarans). The trip out wasn’t too bad...the trip back was much rougher in the rain. And I want you all to know that not once, not once over those bouncy 60 kms, did I cry out loud: CAPTAIN, ARE WE THERE YET?