The Great Barrier Reef

The sun was just beginning to burn through the morning sea mist as we boarded the power boat at Airlie Marina.  60km out to sea, one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World sits just below the surface of the Pacific Ocean - The Great Barrier Reef.  Between Airlie Beach and the Reef lies the Whitsundays - a sprawling collection  of tropical paradise islands.  These slithers of sand and rock protrude from crystal clear waters like the tops of mountains, fringed with swaying coconut trees, coated with dense rainforest, and are, for the most part completely uninhabited.  Once the captain had threaded our vessel through this maze of waterways, we began the long journey across a wide empty sea towards a hidden giant and the largest living organism on the planet.  

Covering an area the same size as Great Britain, the Barrier Reef stretches 2,600km along the east coast of Australia.  Reefworld would be our home for the day, a permanent platform moored roughly half-way along its staggering expanse.  Once we'd been kitted out with masks, snorkels and "stinger suits" (an ultra thin wetsuit designed to protect against stings during the jellyfish season) we descended into the warm turquoise waters.  Having finned our way across a short void of deep water, the reef appeared - a near vertical wall of coral and rock, rising up around 30 metres from the dark depths, glistening in the watery beams of sunlight falling down from the surface, and buzzing with all kinds of marine life.  The top of this immense structure levelled out to leave a giant plane, a sub-aquatic plateau covered with just a couple of feet of water which stretched out into the ocean as far as we could see.  To our left and right, the wall continued, to the north and south - for over one thousand kilometres in each direction.  All over, neon coloured corals covered the structure.  Some fanned out like fern leaves, skeletal palms on spindly branches, exquisitely fragile, paper thin.  Others rolled along the edge of the reef like a blanket of knotted stag antlers, jagged and rough fingers of life, growing just inches each year.  Once we'd summited the wall, fish of every colour, size and shape, swarmed, darted and cruised around us.  Foil like ribbons of shoal fish orbited around like the lights of a disco ball, dark silhouettes of gropers lurked in the distance and the saturated neons of Disney-like tropical fish continued their rounds, weaving among the coral formations and undulating tentacles of sea anemones.  Hand in hand, we drifted over this incredible, alien-like world for hours.