Best dive sites

Some of the worlds best dive sites

Click image to enlarge

Great barrier reef #1

Often hailed as one of the seven underwater wonders of the world, and the largest structure on earth built by living organisms, the Great Barrier Reef located some 30 to 50 miles off the Queensland coast of Australia is actually not a single structure, but a loose chain of thousands of individual reefs, each holding its own biological marvels. Technically, the Great Barrier Reef is in the Coral Sea, but in the dive travel business when you sign up for a Coral Sea trip, you get a ticket to one or more of the far-flung reefs and atolls which are scattered out in the vast expanse of ocean between the Great Barrier Reef and the islands of Vanuatu, the Solomons, New Caledonia and New Guinea which inhabit the Coral Sea. The Coral Sea spans more than 1.5 million square miles of ocean and contains hundreds of separate reefs, atolls, cays and sea mounts. Distances are so great that only one or two reef systems can possibly be visited on a single dive trip. Its reefs span a tremendous range of marine life. Due to the tremendous amount of nutrients flowing through the waters of the Great Barrier Reef, it may not have the crystal-clear visibility often encountered in the Coral Sea. However, it is the nutrient-rich waters of the Great Barrier Reef which attracts and features dense schools of fish, jumbo potato cod groupers, bathtub-sized clams, and a profusion of invertebrate life. By comparison, the Coral Sea is known for vertical walls, enormous sea fans, trees of soft coral like giant crayon-colored broccolis, plenty of sharks, and water so clear that divers appear to be suspended in ether. Whether you pay the premium prices to cruise out to these fabled reefs on the edge of the world, or you stop at the Great Barrier Reef, you’ll be amazed at the endless diversity of life that inhabits Australia’s tropical waters. Australia’s marine park system, which has been the model for marine reserves all over the world, has effectively preserved the bounty of biological wonders on the Great Barrier Reef, while the sheer remoteness of the reefs of the Coral Sea has protected them from exploitation. Some of these reefs, and large stretches of the Barrier Reef itself, are so far from ports of call that they are only beginning to be explored by divers. Historical shipwrecks continue to be discovered, including the wreck of the Pandora, which carried some of the Bounty mutineers, and amazing new biological phenomenon are discovered regularly. The mass spawning of reef corals, one of the most remarkable biological events on the planet, was only discovered in the early part of the last decade. To dive all of the reefs in the area is beyond the scope of a human lifetime, but every diver should experience a sampling of them at least once.