The Great Barrier Reef

Sunday 15th March - Back to the coast

Drove back to Emerald, then turned southwards, pausing to admire the butte of Mount Zamia. Heading eastwards again we drove through basin and range topography with pasture and scattered coal mines for a couple of hundred kilometres. During this part of the drive we counted just 16 cars.

We booked our places on the 'Spirit of 1770' to Lady Musgrave Island for the following day at the township of 1770, then returned down the road to Agnes Water. Calling in at the Agnes Palms motel, we were given a double apartment with cooking and washing facilities and a verandah backing onto the coastal palm grove for the price of a standard motel room.

The boardwalk from the verandah lead a couple of hundred metres through the palms across footbridges over lagoons to the coast. The cyclone had eroded the coastal dune and the access steps now had a temporary vertical rope ladder connecting the top and bottom parts. Along the beach were whole trees that had fallen down the newly formed sand cliff.

Monday 16th March - Finally, the Great Barrier Reef

Up early to catch the boat at 07:30. The sea had a moderate swell and the catamaran was pitching a couple of metres through the waves. We reached Lady Musgrave island, a coral cay on the Great Barrier reef, in about two hours and moored to a pontoon in the centre of the atoll it protects.

The crew threw food into the water and a feeding frenzy erupted. The most spectacular were barracuda like Garfish which when they had a piece of food in their mouths would leap out of the water in an attempt to confuse and outrun any peers that might try to steal it.

We disembarked onto a glass bottomed boat, to reach the island via a turtle cleaning station – a piece of coral where the turtles had worn a hollow by rubbing around in it. The walk round the island was fascinating. Most is vegetated with Pisonia trees, which rot so fast that together with guano from the multitudes of birds, they make a fertile soil covering the coral rubble. The trees were densely inhabited by Noddy birds that had no fear of us, whilst Shearwaters had tunnelled into the ground beneath to make their nests,

On the beach we saw turtle tracks and excavations where turtles had hatched and scuttled down the shore to the sea, also a few broken eggs that hadn't made it.

Returning to the boat for an excellent buffet lunch, we put on our snorkel gear and swam around the coral heads in the atoll. There were myriads of fish of all sizes from minute brightly iridescent coloured fish to large striped fish nuzzling the coral. As you swam over them, giant clams closed their serpentine openings. The floor was mostly broken coral with very large black sea slugs ( soft bodied echinoderms) and a few starfish. The edges of the coral heads however were full of life with multi-coloured tabular corals, brain corals, fan corals and antler corals with blue tips, also a few soft corals.

We left about 15:00 and as we left the atoll we came across a line of giant Manta Rays feeding on a current of plankton. They were each several metres across, black diamond shapes with huge mouths showing when they broke the surface.

The swell had abated when we returned and the skipper did some very clever docking as the tide was out by the time we came into harbour and there was very little room to manoeuvre the boat.