Whitsunday Sailing to The Great Barrier Reef

After booking three last-minute spots on Thursday, we left Friday afternoon for a three day, three night cruise of the Whitsundays, a group of seventy-four islands just off the coast. The boat at full capacity can carry twenty-four passengers and a four-man crew, which would fill all the bunks below deck and necessitate the crew sleeping on deck in the open air. There were only fourteen passengers for our trip though, so there was a good amount of room - as much as can be expected on an eighty-four footer which isn't nearly as big as it sounds.

We were told to be ready to leave at 2:30 PM on Friday, and we sat with the rest of the passengers for an extra hour, finally leaving the harbor around 3:30 PM. It turned out our skipper had spent the night in jail for a drunken/disorderly and barely made it to the ship in time. It was a pretty young crew - the skipper was 23, the first mate was in his late thirties, the divemaster and cook were both 24. I think they were used to having rather wild groups aboard, but ours was pretty tame with most of the passenger electing to catch up on their sleep and read.

The first night we docked after about two and a half hours of motoring - the sea was so calm in fact that we only got under sail twice during the course of the trip. After spending the night in a bunk below deck and losing approximately half a dozen liters of sweat due to the stifling conditions, I decided I would have to find a better spot. One of the crew said that it was possible to climb into the rigging and sleep on the boom about eight feet above the deck, so this is what I did the second night. Rain woke me up though, and I climbed down during the night to find an empty bunk below deck. The second night I again tried sleeping above board, but this time I set up the sail so that when it rained, as it did a number of times again, I could throw the sail over myself and stay relatively dry. Laying parallel with the boom, there was nothing but open sky unaffected by city glow. The stars could be easily seen through the web of rigging above, and it was incredible to fall asleep as the mast was swung gently from side to side by the sea breezes.

The second day most of us did a dive, entering off the beach of one of the islands and going to depth for around fifteen minutes. Those who were not diving snorkeled, and after that we headed out to The Great Barrier Reef where we tied up the second night. It took about three hours to make it out to the reef, and it was incredibly relaxing to sit near the stern, catching the occasional cooling spray of water across my back. Flying fish would now and again burst out of the wake and flit a few seconds ahead of the boat before diving back into the water. Aside from that there was little to see, only the horizon and the islands getting progressively smaller.

I was not impressed by the first dive, and was hoping that the reef dive would make the trip worthwhile. I was in the first group of divers at the reef, and we all dropped in off the dinghy and began to descend. Keeping my eye on my depth gauge, I was surprised to see that I was already at 18 meters, and the ocean bed was still approximately 10 meters away. It turns out we had dropped in at the wrong spot, and after one of the beginner divers began hyperventilating and decided to opt out, the divemaster had us hold on to the dinghy as were towed over to another spot.

Unfortunately, the reef dive was not much of an improvement over the the island dive, and after I surfaced after forty minutes swimming over The Great Barrier Reef, I realized how spoiled I had been learning to dive in Madagascar. The diversity of ocean life, fish as well as coral was significantly better in Madagascar - even the visibility was quite a bit better. If we had gotten onto The Great Barrier Reef somewhere that wasn't daily visited by tourists, it might have been a richer experience, but I will have to come back someday to see if that's the case.