Our dive trip to the Great Barrier Reef did not go exactly as planned. Our original intention was to leave the marina in Airlie Beach late on a Tuesday and make the 50 mile journey to the Reef in time for a Wednesday early morning dive. However, Mother Nature had some other plans - the usual sunny Queensland coast has been unusually cloudy, windy and sometimes rainy ever since we arrived three weeks ago. The skipper of our boat received some high wind advisories and decided to forgo the large seas developing offshore. Instead of heading for the Reef we motored to the Whitsunday Islands, some continental islands lying just offshore the mainland Queensland coast discovered and named by Captain Cook in 1770. These islands are mountainous and heavily forested and surrounded by beautiful fringing coral reefs.

We dropped anchor off Hook Island at 4am, an event so dreadfully noisy in the middle of a peaceful sleep that few people were actually able regain their previous restful state. We spent all of Wednesday diving at various spots around Hook Island - two morning dives, an afternoon dive, and a night dive. Though Queensland, Australia is in the tropics, our proximity to the tropical margins resulted in some chilly winter sea temperature - 72 degrees F on every dive we did - BRRRR! I was warm only while wearing a 3mm full wetsuit underneath another 3mm shorty wetsuit, an arrangement that made for quite a production in getting in and then out of the water four times a day.

Good new comes late in the evening in the form of the latest weather report. A slight subsidence in the winds emboldens our skipper to attempt a run out to the Great Barrier Reef. Around 4 o'clock in the morning on Thursday we drop our mooring and set off for the reef. Once again not many divers sleep past four as the journey out is still a little too rough for true comfort. We arrive at our mooring at Bait Reef - one of the 2900 small reefs that make up the GBR - at around 6 am, eat breakfast, and dive. Our dives take us in a straight north/south axis visiting a series of large blocky coral heads that rise 100' or so above the sandy bottom to poke their flat noses above the water at low tide. There are about ten of these coral heads spaced roughly 50 meters apart, necessitating a series of dives to thoroughly explore all their intricacies and tiny creatures. Remarkably, we notice a shortage of the large barrel and tube sponges that are often a highlight of dives in the Caribbean. Dr. Pepe feels that this is probably due to the incredible proliferation of soft-bodied corals that may fill this ecological niche on the GBR. Highlights include whitetip reef sharks, enormous groupers of a variety of species, black spotted toad fish (a species of puffer), a yellow boxfish, large gardens of bright blue staghorn coral (home to a foot long Triton's Trumpet seashell - alive), and finally, a school of twelve four-foot Bumphead parrotfish crunching on the coral and excreting sand. The Parrotfish excretion was ceremoniously accomplished by a great deal of dancing and spinning - quite amazing!

Our night dive features sightings of a large loggerhead turtle, as well as a smaller unidentified species, whitetip reef sharks, and an incredible visit by dozens of large silver jacks (trevalleys) that react to our dive lights by darting at high speeds within inches of our lights and dive masks. It is rather scary to have three-foot fish weighing 50 to 60 pounds hurdling at full speed right at you only to pass within inches of your mask - I was even able to touch some as they passed me.

Our skipper decides again to abandon our GBR dive plans and opts to leave the Reef for the Whitsunday Islands early Friday morning in anticipation of returning high speed winds and bad seas. Once again we drop our mooring at 4 am, once again we arrive at our dive destination at 6am, and once again most can not sleep after departure due to enormous swell that sends our boat crunching down into the wave troughs and compresses us into our bunks. This now makes three nights in a row for me of bedtime after midnight - due to late night card games - and 4 am wake ups. It is remarkable how submersion in 72 degree water for an hour four times a day helps keep one wide awake all day. We are all a little disappointed in leaving the marine bounty of the famed Great Barrier Reef for the much less proclaimed Whitsunday Islands. However, our dives that day off Hayman Island help to lessen that disappointment by featuring even better coral gardens than the GBR (at least the place we visited). These corals were of as many varieties and as many colors as I have seen in years of diving across the tropical Pacific. A bonus was the gardens of anemones within the gardens of coral. Sandy patches within the coral reef were home to upwards of 40 to 50 one-foot diameter anemones, packed tightly together and of every color of the rainbow. I have never seen anything like it. Curiously, these anemones were not home to the clown anemone fish or other anemone fishes so common in the slightly larger anemones.

For anyone who has seen or heard of the movie "Open Water", the Great Barrier Reef was the site of a diving accident that occurred a few years ago when a dive boat did not do a headcount and left two divers on the reef - who consequently perished. For this reason our dive company was quite adament about doing diver headcounts following each dive. Each diver signs a roster after entering the boat following every dive. The penalty for sitting down to lunch without signing the return diver roster is a giant spoonful of vegemite - a hideous concoction of salty yeast that most Australians seem actually to enjoy. I suffered this hideous fate on the last day and took my punishment like a man - but I was crying on the inside.

Contact Dr. Philip Pepe
E-mail phil.pepe@pcmail.maricopa.edu