Undersea Explorer

By Mark O'Connor

Photography by Jay Wink

Twenty metres. Twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-six, twenty-eight. My dive computer tells me that I'm dropping like a stone, but I hardly feel like I'm moving at all. If it wasn't for the top of a reef looming closer I could swear I was floating, suspended in neutral buoyancy, surrounded by dark blue walls of water. At 30 metres depth I inject a bit of air into my BCD (buoyancy control device) and hover just above the coral. Looking up towards the surface I see the rest of my dive group slowly approaching the reef, a series of black shapes on a background of sun-filled ocean are like insects around a light. The reef below me peels away into an incomprehensible depth, like looking down a steep mountain cliff from above the cloud.  The visibility is outstanding. 30 metres below, I can see Grey Whaler and Silvertip Reef Sharks gliding along the reef, darting carefully from side to side without showing the slightest sign of exertion. None of the sharks are much over two metres in length, and according to Dive Instructor and Marine Biologist, Clare Omodei "They won't attack you, and if they do, you probably deserve it."

As the group assembles I can see individual's eyes bugling behind their dive masks. With excitement or fear, I can't quite tell; my underwater communication skills don't stretch that far. After a few minutes of shark observation, Omodei leads us up the enormous wall of The North Horn, one of Osprey Reefs most spectacular dive sites. The group follows accordingly, keeping an eye on the cavernous blue in search of spectacular sea life; we were told that schooling hammerhead sharks were seen here last week. In the distance I see a flash of something dark. It is coming towards us and my heart starts beating like a bass drum at a heavy metal concert. I narrow my eyes into the distance to get a better look; in front of us our Dive Instructor Omodei is going crazy, waving her arms around and trying to get our attention. I look back to where I saw the black shape and suddenly it is not just a shape but a very discernable creature. A Giant Manta Ray at least three metres wide drifts past in the most elegant fashion. The ray hardly seems to be moving. Its enormous wings flutter slightly, like washing on a clothes line, yet he moves at an impressive pace. The entire group is motionless, spellbound and completely absorbed by this incredible creature. Its appearance is quite bizarre, proof perhaps that alien life forms do exist. He is beautiful all the same and completely deserving of our undivided attention. I was under 25 metres of water, neither sinking nor rising , while currents gently pushed me around with the airy silence of the ocean all to accompany me as the Giant Manta Ray glided past. In that moment I find it hard to believe that out there in this very same world, cities bustle, business deals are done and wars rage on. These creatures continue to exist in their own time and on their own terms, oblivious to humans and their issues. As we head along the reef wall we are treated to another Giant Manta Ray, one that is completely still. A small turtle swims in and out of the reef wall, either looking for food or just hiding from the giant, bubble-blowing black shapes that hover over him. Osprey Reef in the mean time has got me. I'm enchanted. This is one of the best places I have ever been.

The boat 'Undersea Explorer' has been running live-aboard dive trips on the Great Barrier and surrounding reefs for the last 14 years. However, this is a dive boat with a difference as they are the only research based dive boat operating on the Great Barrier Reef. With several research projects and a minimum of two marine biologists on board, clients are encouraged to actively participate in research tasks. Two positions on every trip are reserved for researchers and often these will include world-renowned experts. Shark researcher and activist Richard Fitzpatrick is a regular on the boat, and Minke Whale expert Dr Alastair Birtles is onboard for all six weeks of the Minke Whale season. If you get a trip on the Undersea Explorer when such experts are onboard, you could be lucky enough to see a three metre long Tiger shark captured, tagged and released. Or you could dive with Minke Whales and then hear about their individual history from a man who can identify over four hundred of the whales simply by sight. On this particular trip the draw card is Osprey Reef. The most northerly of the Coral Sea reefs, Osprey sits three hundred and ten kilometres northeast of Port Douglas, far enough away that you can't even see Australia. It is widely regarded as one of the best dive sights in Australia which, when it comes to diving, pretty much means the world. It is home to a myriad of different fish, huge soft coral trees, stunning coral reefs and sharks, lots of sharks.

Before I set out on my six day journey, I had a few hours to kill before the boat left Port Douglas and I decided to take a good walk around on Terra Firma (dry land), before being confined to a rocking boat, but I ended up at the marina. It's hard to get away from the ocean in Port Douglas. Although smaller, the marina here is much like the one down the road in Cairns. Large commercial dive and fishing boats dominate the berths. Deck hands in bare feet and company t-shirts wash salt off the boats, getting ready for the next inevitable hoard of tourists which will come through tomorrow. Smaller fishing boats line one side of the marina. Their crews are enjoying a few beers in the late afternoon sun and swapping stories about the days battles.  It seems fish and clients feature equally in these tales. These scenes paint an obvious picture; the Great Barrier Reef is a sought-after experience. One of the seven natural wonders of the world and located in beautiful tropical north Queensland, it is a tourist mecca. Tour operators are numerous, and business is booming.

Perhaps the best thing about a dive trip of this length is the isolation. Four hours from Port Douglas and already we are well out of range of most of the day boats. The plan is to cruise north along the outer Great Barrier Reef for the first day before making a dash to Osprey Reef on the second night. Only four dive vessels go to Osprey Reef, and Undersea Explorer is the only one who does so regularly. Crowds won't be a problem. Our inaugural dive is at Pixie Gardens, a shallow site located on Ribbon Reef number nine. We have the opportunity to complete four dives a day, one of which is a night dive. Dive Instructor Omodei gives a thorough briefing for the first dive and on how the rest of the trip will run. "The schedule for each day will be to eat, dive, eat, dive, eat, dive, eat, dive, eat, in that order," so a little more eating than diving, but only just.  The food is superb.  A five star chef prepares all the meals onboard and each day we are treated to an international smorgasbord of exquisite cuisine. Omodei advises us about the dangers of drinking too much before diving. "Don't go on a big bender the night before," she warns, "because the next day you'll get bent." A pun on the decompression sickness known as 'the bends', a condition often associated with diving. Dive briefings are fairly thorough on Undersea, generally consisting of a detailed map drawn on a whiteboard followed by a lot of banter about what some of the drawings represent. The crew's knowledge of these dive sights is phenomenal. Often they detail exactly where certain fish live, and what they saw at sites on recent trips. This is certainly handy when trying to spot Stonefish, the veritable chameleon of the ocean. This fish is so camouflaged it looks more like a stone than a stone. They love to hide in the shallow crevices of reef walls, staying completely motionless. Perhaps this is why they look so disgruntled when an expert eye spots them and reveals their true identity to other divers. At Pixie Gardens this happened twice. Not because I found the Stonefish however , I needed the trained eye of much more experienced divers. A Giant Moray Eel was the other highlight of this dive. He poked his large green head and neck curiously out of his hole as we swam past. A few small parasites cleaned his body and he even opened his mouth to reveal one cleaning his tongue. Moray eels were a regular feature on this trip as a number of times I swam over a piece of rock or coral and was startled by a large green head and glaring eyes. Chris Witty, a marine biologist on Undersea Explorer, warned us that Morays aren't always so placid. "When I was instructing in Thailand a friend of mine took a sausage on a dive with him to feed a resident Moray Eel. He kept it hidden behind his back, but the eel came up from behind him and bit off his thumb. It took the sausage as well". Thanks to this story, I kept a safe distance from Morays on every dive.

A presentation on sharks follows the first two dives of day one. Most onboard head down into the lecture lounge, get comfortable, and listen up. Witty gives a basic run-through of the sharks we will expect to see at Osprey Reef and the ones we won't; luckily Great Whites aren't into the warm waters of this region. This is more than just an identification show, however. We also hear about the very serious threat facing sharks today. "Ninety percent of all sharks have disappeared over the last ten years" Witty informs. "We are losing them at a phenomenal rate. If this pattern continues then within the next twenty years the entire shark population will be completely annihilated." Low fecundity rates mean sharks produce very low numbers of young and can't keep up with the forces that destroy them. The biggest offenders here by a long way are fishing boats that kill sharks for the lucrative shark fin soup trade in Asia. Shark fins can be worth as much as two hundred U.S. dollars a pound in Asian markets. Shark meat is worth less than one percent of that. The market is so profitable that fishing boats from Indonesia risk arrest from the navy and coast guard, cross the Coral Sea and illegally enter Australian waters. Here they perform the brutal act of dragging sharks to the surface, hacking off their fins and then discarding the rest of the body to die slowly in the ocean.

"It is nothing less than abhorrent," says boat engineer and dive instructor Jon Marsden. "And it is still unknown how this culling will affect the nature of the food chain." Marsden has worked on board the Undersea Explorer for seven years and makes a good argument. "If you put a value on shark, for example what are people willing to pay to go onto a dive boat and dive with them you would find that they are definitely worth protecting." In fact, a figure has been put on a shark's value, and they are actually worth more to tourism than they are to the shark fin trade. "As politicians realise that the money coming in from this type of tourism is quite substantial, they will hopefully be quick to pass the legislation necessary to give sharks full protection." It is these talks and information that make Undersea Explorer distinct. Instead of lounging about between dives sleeping and eating (although there is time for this too), divers are informed about the ocean they enjoy, and on how some of their money is put towards a very worthy cause.

The Great Barrier Reef is split into four sections; the Mackay/Capricorn section in the south, the Central section, the Cairns Section and the Far Northern section. We dived on the Cairns section for our first day before steaming over to Osprey Reef at night. "Eat dinner, pop some pills and go to bed" Omodei advised. "It is going to be a little rough". A slight under-exaggeration. The boat pitched and rolled like a rollercoaster all night. I just managed to keep my roast dinner down between occasional periods of sleep; a sleep that was disrupted by a fridge ripping its bracings off the wall and crashing to the floor. "I didn't think it was all that rough" Jon Marsden casually remarked in the morning. Maybe my sea legs aren't as good as I thought. We arrived at Osprey in one piece; even the fridge and most of its contents were salvaged. By 7:30 am we have eaten breakfast and are suited up ready to explore Admiralty's Anchor, a site named after an old rusty ship's anchor still wedged in the coral. From the surface Osprey Reef doesn't look like much, a 21km by 4 km oval blur. The shallow lighter blue against the surrounding dark deeper waters are its only give-away. But when you venture a few metres below the surface, another world exists; a place of flourishing life. A place where creatures of every conceivable size, shape, colour and rank exist in the bustle of an underwater Sydney or New York. Admiralty's Anchor and our second dive at North Horn were the perfect intro to Osprey. Parrot fish, Moorish Idols, Trevally, Tuna, White Tip Reef and Grey Whaler sharks, Potato Cod, Clownfish and brilliant coral formations amazed in over 20 metres of visibility. This was like no diving I had ever done; you could feel the isolation. Osprey is not just another over-dived site in one of the worlds big dive centres. It is unspoiled and untouched. Too secluded to be common. We dived Admiralty's Anchor at night too. With the aid of spotlights we submerged into the darkness and saw much of what we had seen during the day. In fact, the ocean changes very little after the sun goes down. The silence seems greater though. Just like on land, when the sense of sight is taken away and sound becomes more poignant, the peace and quiet of the sea is impossibly amplified. On this night dive huge brown Potato Cod, the size of Labradors, cruised around the reef feeding. As I swam through a cave I met a pair coming the opposite way. There wasn't enough room for the three of us in there, but instead of turning scared and swimming away, the pair split and swam either side of me, brushing up against my arms as they passed. This is the sort of thing you can expect at a site where visiting dive boats are a rarity.

Divers of all abilities enjoy Undersea Explorer's trips, and it is a great opportunity for younger and less experienced divers to chat with some of the stalwarts. Bob Halstead is definitely in this category. Bob owned and ran his own dive company in Papua New Guinea for twenty years. He is the author of several books including Coral Sea Reef Guide and The Lonely Planet Diving and Snorkeling Guide to Papua New Guinea. He has won several gold medals in international underwater photography and logged over seven thousand dives. He is a walking encyclopedia on tropical fish identification. You could either look it up in the book, or simply ask Bob. He wrote the book anyway. His stories are fascinating, and in some cases jaw-dropping. Take the time, for instance, that he and his buddy were diving with a salt water crocodile. "We found that with two of us in the water making a lot of noise, we could actually intimidate the croc and it kept its distance. When my mate ran out of camera battery and returned to the boat however, the crocodile's attitude changed entirely. He turned toward me, stared at me with one eye and opened up his mouth to reveal a large set of teeth. I took a photo and then my film ran out. It was probably a good time to go back to the dinghy anyway."

Day four was brilliant. In the morning we drift dived at Raging Horn where we met the Manta Rays. Drift diving basically means jumping off a moving boat and dropping straight down. It allows you to drift along with the current back to the boat. The second dive was at the west wall of the North Horn, a place where plant life is even more impressive than the fish. Enormous coral trees sprouted out from the wall in a kaleidoscope of colour, their snowflake patterned branches swinging gently in the current.   Now 'shark attracting' does not sound like something you would normally do whilst scuba diving, not intentionally anyway. So when the crew began talking about attracting sharks for our second dive at Raging Horn, I thought they were having me on. But sure enough, as I dropped into the water, Jon Marsden was busy on the dive deck putting old tuna heads into a makeshift cage. It's not as bad as it sounds. Actually it was fantastic. The whole group dropped down to about 16 metres and sat around a natural rock amphitheatre. When everyone was ready for the show, Marsden dived down with his cage of tuna heads on a rope and tied them to the stage, a rock at the centre of our semi circle. Almost immediately sharks were everywhere.  Swimming within feet of where we sat, their eyes darted around at the audience with a sort of criminal intent. These were no colossus of the deep however, two metres being the largest of the lot. Even so, they are amazing creatures to watch, they glide effortlessly through the water, changing tact in an instant.

Leaving Osprey Reef after day four, we motored south to Ribbon Reef Number ten, home of the well renowned site of Cod Hole. This was a superb dive featuring a haven for hundreds of different fish, including one Hairy Nosed Ghost Pipe Fish. Yes, this fish is as rare as its name suggests. Next was Challenger Bay;  an octopus' garden, with brilliant hunks of coral spread out over a flat bed of sand all sitting in less than twenty meters of water. In the evening around fifteen volunteers assist marine biologist Chris Witty in his research on nautilus.
Nautiluses are the oldest living creatures on the planet, and the only ones to have survived all five of the 'big' extinctions. Every trip Witty throws down cages at various sites and then drags them up the next day to conduct his research. "Undersea Explorer is the only organisation in the world to still be conducting nautilus research," he explains. "For nine years we have been carrying out this research, under permit, to ascertain their approximate numbers. The aim of the study is to collect enough data to indicate low numbers which will hopefully lead to a government moratorium on their shells being taken from the ocean." The shells of nautilus are often sold in tourist markets. With assembly line efficiency nautilus shells are numbered, measured and recorded. Sexes are noted and samples of a tentacle are taken. My job is to write over the engraved number in felt pen and I notice over two thousand nautilus have been through this process, an impressive effort.

The other long-term study for Undersea is water testing. At specific locations Witty takes water samples from the back of the boat and completes a quick analysis before storing samples for further investigation.  Essentially the aim of this study is to assess nitrogen content in the water, generally present as a result of agricultural runoff, which affects plant growth underwater. Eventually this information will be correlated onto satellite imagery of the reef. These are only a few of the studies running on Undersea Explorer at the moment, and exemplify their commitment to preserving the environment in which they operate. As a result of Undersea's influence, 33 percent of the Great Barrier Reef is under full protection, up from a dismal four percent only a few years ago. And Osprey is next. The company is currently lobbying for its full protection. They practice what they preach too - Undersea is the first live-aboard boat on the Great Barrier Reef to use biofuel. Currently they run under fifty percent biofuel, and next year they hope to be at one hundred. Pulling back into Port Douglas is surreal. It feels strange to be so close to land again, although I'm ready for a break. Four dives a day can be exhausting. Plus my ears haven't felt normal in a while. A sense of accomplishment dominates, however; this has been an incredible experience. One that has involved as much learning and insightful conversation as it has thrilling action.  I'll definitely be back one day. Although next time I think it will be for ten days,  just to see what's out that bit further.