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Australia
It's got the world's largest coral reef, as well as a wealth of other dive sites. But how good is the diving? DIVE readers give their views.
  Photo: Sue Scott  Photo: Sue Scott  Photo: Sue Scott |
It's got the world's largest coral reef, as well as a wealth of other dive sites. But how good is the diving? DIVE readers give their views. Interviews by Kate Quarry.
Great Barrier Reef
Designated a World Heritage Site in 1981, this reef runs along Australia’s
east coast for 2,300km. The GBR is Australia’s main attraction for divers,
most of whom take trips from Cairns and Townsville in Queensland out to the
reef. Dayboats and liveaboards are both available. The Coral Sea is to the east
of the GBR and offers better visibility, less-dived reefs and, often, more sightings
of larger sharks. It can be accessed by liveaboard only.
Ningaloo Reef
This 280km-long fringing reef is a marine park, and begins 1,200km north of
Perth on Australia’s western coast. It can be accessed from Coral Bay and
Exmouth. Much of the reef is currently in very good condition, as most of the
coast is uninhabited. The reef is one of the last homes to the rare dugong.
South of the GBR
Cooler water diving (13–23°C) attracts few dive tourists along the
southern coast, which is famous primarily for white shark cage dives that run
in Adelaide from February to September.
Northern coast
Most of this coastline is inaccessible, although there is some diving from Darwin.
Visibility is frequently badly affected by the tidal range.
When to go
Australia is so large that it’s hard to generalise, but here are a few
pointers: remember, Australia’s seasons are the reverse of our own. The
GBR can be dived all year round, but all of northern Australia experiences a
rainy season from November to April, which can adversely affect visibility,
as can coral spawning, which occurs during late spring. The November to March
period is also the time for box jellyfish coming close to shore, which may affect
swimming if you’re having a shore-based holiday. Cyclones may also occur
during this time. The windiest weather is encountered April–July. Minke
whales migrate along the reef in June and July, and humpbacks both breed and
migrate June–October. The Coral Sea offers visibility of 35m for much of
the year, but access to sites may be more affected by winds during April–July.
The rush hour on the Ningaloo Reef is March–May, when the whale sharks
migrate.
What to wear
On the Ningaloo and GBR you’re unlikely to need more than a 5mm suit, but
around Sydney, Perth and other southern sites a two-piece semi-dry or drysuit
is recommended in winter.
What to look out for
In warmer, coral-rich waters you’ll find potato cod, grouper, anemonefish,
schools of kingfish, jacks, batfish and barracuda,
and you may spot sea snakes, manta, bull and eagle rays, as well as turtles
and reef sharks. Further south, in areas that have mainly rocky reefs colonised
by sponges, expect to see octopus, cuttlefish, wobbegongs and – for those
with good eyesight – frogfish, seahorses and leafy sea dragons. Australia’s
waters are home to a variety of sharks, including tiger, white, Port Jackson
and whale sharks.
Water and air temperatures
GBR air temperatures around Cairns and Townsville drop to 25°C in May and
June and reach around 32°C from December to February. The sea temperature
ranges from about 22°C in June and July to 29°C in January. July in
Sydney sees water temperatures fall to 13–16°C while air temperatures
hover around 15°C, in summer – January and February – the water
temperatures is 18–23°C and the air temperature 29°C.
Grumpy groupers - Jason Poynting
Jason Poynting, 33, is a computer programmer from Surrey. He has visited Australia five times. His most recent trip was in September 2002, when he travelled from Darwin to Queensland via Alice Springs, taking in some diving on the way. Jason’s many diving qualifications include PADI divemaster, IANTD advanced nitrox and TDI trimix.
The reason I’ve been to Australia so many times is because there’s so much to do, as well as the diving. Although the flights can be expensive, the diving’s quite cheap, as is travelling around once you’ve got there.
On my last trip to Australia I spent one day diving in Darwin, which wasn’t great as the visibility was so poor. After travelling to Alice Springs and going to see Ayers Rock I moved on to Cairns where I’d booked a five-day trip on the liveaboard Taka II, which went north from Cairns to the Ribbon Reefs and the Cod Hole, one of the most famous sites on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). I thought the Cod Hole wasn’t that impressive. A fish feed was organised and about four big potato cod turned up, as did loads of red bass and a white-tip reef shark. I’m not a fan of fish feeding, but when they tried to stop it at the Cod Hole the potato cod got aggressive.
We did some nice pinnacle dives with good visibility, and saw lots of fish, such as big-eye trevally, fusiliers, lionfish, sweetlips, pipefish, pufferfish, chevron barracuda and the odd turtle and blue-spotted stingray. The Ribbon Reefs were also good, but the closer we got back to Port Douglas and Cairns, the more the visibility and the coral deteriorated. A lot of the staghorn coral was dead and covered with green algae. Crown-of-thorns starfish had also eaten a lot of the coral. Because my sinuses were aching I missed the last dive at Milne Reef, but the others said it was the worst of the trip. I dived it in 1998, when the coral was healthy. It seems to have suffered badly in only a few years.
Taka II is quite a slow boat, so it steams at night, but I slept through the engine noise and stayed asleep even when they put the anchor down. It’s a shame we couldn’t get to Osprey Reef, where there are some really nice walls and drop-offs, but the weather was too windy. After getting back to Cairns I went south to Mission Beach and then Townsville, where I dived the wreck of the Yongala from a dayboat run by Adrenalin Dive. The Yongala’s one of the best sites in Australia for seeing big stuff such as Queensland groupers, turtles and stingrays. One of the groupers on the Yongala is known as Grumpy – he’s about 2m long and on one occasion got a diver’s head in his mouth. The diver was all right though – he blacked out, I think. The wreck’s covered in life, but the average British wrekkie would be disappointed, as it has big, inviting holds that you’re not allowed to enter at all. It’s worth diving, though, and there’s more marine life here than on some of the reefs.
Before I came back to England I took another short, liveaboard trip from Airlie Beach, on which most of the other divers were taking their open-water courses. I think the Ningaloo Reef, on the western side of Australia, can offer better diving than the GBR, and the Muiron Islands [a one-and-a-half-hour boat ride from Exmouth, Western Australia] are also good. The dives I’d really like to do are the HMS Swan, off Perth, the HMS Perth, off Albany, and the HMS Hobart, off Adelaide. I’ve done some diving from Melbourne in the early spring, and the conditions were similar to Cornwall in summer, but with a strong surge that you can feel even down at 30m. The dive operators are a lot less restrictive, so that dives can be longer. In Queensland some operators keep dive times to 40 minutes long, and your first dive must be your deepest; you are often kept out of the water if you make your second dive deeper than the first. I think any diver should check with the dive operator about any restrictions before they book.
I’ve done 140 dives in Australia, and it’s hard to choose a favourite dive, but I do like Byron Bay. You see lots of jewfish and wobbegongs – it’s just a nice place to dive.
Shark action - Maria Stone
Maria Stone, 28, is a retail assistant from Norwich. She qualified as a diver on the Great Barrier Reef in 1999 and is now a BSAC sports diver. As part of a holiday to Sydney in January 2002, she dived some sites just outside Sydney Harbour.
I was on a two-and-a-half week holiday in Sydney and got chatting to some people in the King’s Cross area of the city about the diving there. I became very interested in a site called Magic Point, nicknamed ‘The Shark Dive’. I’ve been to Sydney Aquarium a few times to see the large sharks in there, and I really wanted to see them in their natural environment.
There are a few dive centres in that area of Sydney, and on this trip I went with King’s Cross Divers. The site’s just outside Bondi, and that day the water was rather choppy, but the visibility was good, about 20m. I was on a dayboat with six divers and a dive leader. There was a lot of life down there and plenty of colourful sponge formations. I swam through a massive shoal of yellowtail fish and then saw the first sand tiger shark, which, like the others, was about 1.5m long. My heart began to beat a little faster, as I’d never seen a shark that size before.
With the other divers I knelt down in the sand, not too close to the cave entrance where the sharks gather. About 15 sand tigers – which are called grey nurse sharks locally – patrol the entrance to the cave, which is really just a tiny crack in the rock. As you kneel in the sand the sharks come right up to you and then veer off suddenly – it’s as if they’re trying to stare you out. We stayed there for ages watching them. They’ve got three rows of teeth, which look quite scary, but they’re pretty harmless, really. When we were getting low on air we moved off and the dive leader pointed out a 1.5m wobbegong, which isn’t something that everyone can tick off in their logbook.
The boat then went to a site off North Head, which is the north entrance to Sydney Harbour, called the Wall of China, where there are loads of colourful sponges. I saw lots of urchins, and I looked out for some of the animals I know you can see there, such as Port Jackson sharks, leafy sea dragons and rays, including a resident 2m bull ray, but I didn’t manage to spot any of them. I did find a big, friendly grouper down at 15–20m, but I later heard that the fish had been caught by spearfishermen after I left.
In January it was summer and the water was 22–23°C, but I think it never gets colder than 19°C. I was quite comfortable in a 5mm semi-dry. I have dived the Great Barrier Reef, and the diving in Sydney is totally different from there. I wasn’t sure the diving would be up to much, so the shark dive, which was fantastic, was just so unexpected. I did one other site on that trip, with Southern Cross Divers, just outside the harbour. It was a sheltered spot with lots of sponges again and rock boulders coming up to the cliff face.
My dad lives in Sydney and has a friend who saw a great white while diving Reef Wall, a site close to Sydney. I’d feel a little nervous going to Reef Wall knowing that, but I don’t think it would stop me diving. So many divers go there every day and the chances of being eaten are pretty slim – I’ve spoken to loads of divers in Sydney and they’ve never seen one. I love sharks, but it’s the only one that I wouldn’t want to see in the water without a very strong cage between us! When I dive Sydney again, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
Big fish bonanza - Susie Townson
Susie Townson, 32, lives in Blackheath, Southeast London, and is a producer
for BBC Television. When she went travelling in Australia and New Zealand she
loved the diving so much that she ended up working in Port Douglas, Queensland,
as a dive leader for eight months.
I learned to dive about ten years ago, but after qualifying and a couple of
diving holidays, I didn’t dive for about six years. I took some time out
to go off travelling in Australia and New Zealand, and after my first dive on
the Great Barrier Reef I thought, ‘This is it!’ I fell in love with
the diving. At that point I had my open-water qualification, so I then took
all the necessary courses up to divemaster so that I could lead dive groups.
I was living in Port Douglas, a small beach town on the way up to Daintree.
It’s an idyllic place, with palm trees and the water in all shades of blue.
I originally went to Port Douglas to meet a friend who had was there for a two-week
holiday, but I ended up staying there for months, and she has never come back
from Australia – she married an Australian boat skipper!
Once I’d qualified I was working for a dive company called Quicksilver,
taking groups out on dayboats, doing three dives a day. We visited about 15
sites, most of which were very good, although there were a few that weren’t
great, which we’d only visit on days when the weather was too bad for us
to go anywhere else. My favourites included Barracuda Bommie, which of course
has a lot of barracuda, and you would swim round and round the bommie, getting
shallower,
and Three Sisters, where you were guaranteed reef sharks. Three Sisters is a
wall dive with bommies to explore at the end, and there are a lot of Maori wrasse,
which are also called Napoleon wrasse, clownfish in anemones and large groups
of buffalofish. The buffalofish are really big and quite prehistoric-looking.
It was at Three Sisters that I had an opportunity to dive with dolphins. I’d
been on trips specifically to swim with wild dolphins in other places, but this
was a chance encounter. We were gearing up to dive and saw the dolphins. I just
jumped in with one other diver who was ready. It was wonderful to be down there
with the dolphins – they only stayed a few minutes and ignored us, really,
but we were close to them. On another dive I saw a tiger shark. I was with a
group of four divers, only two of whom saw the shark. It was lying on the bottom,
and didn’t really notice us. Eventually it just swam off. In that area
in August you see humpback whales nearly every day on the way to dive sites,
and we got quite close and watched them breaching.
The visibility was normally very good and the water was always warm, around
27°C. To me, the coral seemed fantastic, but it had been a long time since
I’d dived. People who came back to dive the area after having visited ten
years previously were disappointed with the coral, and divers who’d been
to the Red Sea said the Great Barrier Reef wasn’t as good. There was a
problem with crown-of-thorns starfish, and some of the dive leaders would go
out to try to get rid of them on their days off. Port Douglas does get box jellyfish
[from November to March], but they stay close to shore, so they’re not
out at the dive sites. The beaches are netted at that time, so you can still
swim.
One of the best things about being a dive leader is sharing your diving experiences
with people. When you get someone who’s reluctant to go snorkelling and
you’re there when they first realise what’s under the water, it’s
great. I also loved taking people to dive at places such as Turtle Bommie, because
seeing animals such as turtles or dolphins really makes their diving experience.
I very much enjoyed doing all the courses, as it was the first time in my life
that I was really interested in what I was studying. Port Douglas is quite a
young person’s place, but I didn’t mind if I couldn’t go out
because I was studying, as I enjoyed learning all about the coral and the gear.
The standard of diving is really tight in Queensland. The teaching was very
thorough, and Quicksilver was very strict with the dive leaders: we were constantly
checking our divers and their air.
It was just an amazing time. On some trips I was on surface watch and I’d
look down into the water through the coral and watch the fish and the divers
– I had to keep pinching myself. Now it seems like a dream.