Diving the Great Barrier Reef

Diving the Great Barrier Reef is a pretty amazing experience - the variety of coral and fishes is incredible. Unfortunately, there are many places where the coral is badly damaged or destroyed, probably from too many people diving those locations.

Where it’s healthy, though, it’s beautiful. There are quite a few varieties of coral I recognized from other tropical dive areas – fan coral, staghorn coral, brain coral – but there were tons of new types that I had never seen anywhere else and in every color of the rainbow. Shelf corals that grow from the reef like great big knick knack shelves that have grown their own brackets. Upon their flat surfaces are other corals that look like little pointy cities made out of left over piles of that bad dried out frosting that is used to create those pre-made Happy Birthday cake decorations you get at the grocery store, tipped in bright blue or pink or purple, as if someone had inverted them and dipped them in paint, and within the tiny cities are even tinier fishies – no longer than my pinkie fingernail and about half the width in shades of electric blue and sunshiny yellow. There were hundreds of little black and white sergeant fish that looked like a mini chain gang in their prison stripes. There were Maori Wrasse that were at least three feet long with big old forehead bumps that made them look like some kind of aquatic Neanderthals. We saw a few white tipped reef sharks, which are pretty harmless to us and Jeff saw a turtle; although, I only ever saw a turtle from the boat as it came up for air. We saw giant clams with lips in shades of purple, brown, blue, and teal and sometimes all those colors together, puffing water in and out of their feeding tubes like some old guy working a stogie. There were nudibranchs (sea slugs in fancy clothes) that looked like tiny flamenco dancers and rays that were the color of the sand and big fat sea cucumbers and surgeonfish looking intellectual and angelfish looking angelic and parrotfish grinning at us as they munched on coral and bright yellow butterfly fish flitting about. It’s crowded down there!

At one point we swam into not just a school of fish, but what looked like a university of fish – individual schools of 10 or 12 different types of fish, all hanging out together (but segregated) in the same sheltered spot, drifting back forth in the surge. So we hung out too, just letting ourselves be part of the ecosystem for a while, as the ocean pushed us gently back and forth. Another time we came around a corner into what looked like a giant’s vegetable garden. There were huge corals, the size of Volkswagens that were shaped like ruffled lettuces and ornamental kales and cauliflowers – it was truly astonishing to see. There was a rosy pink coral that looked like it was made of chenille, and as the water moved over it, it would do a funky little shimmy. There was a chartreuse kelp that looked like bunches of silky curtain tassels upside down and swaying in the current. There are hundreds of other corals and fish we saw that stopped us in our tracks, and I could never describe them in any way that could provide even a fraction of the sense of wonder I felt.

As we explored, I found myself thinking about old Jacques Cousteau and what he must have seen and felt as he discovered so many of these places, often the first human being to ever set eyes on them. How could he have ever made people understand how amazing our underwater world is? But he did. By bringing cameras with him and dedicating himself to be an educator and conservator, he showed us that just below the surface of the water is a world so incredible it can only be seen to be believed. It is precious and valuable and indescribably beautiful.