The remote far northern Great Barrier Reef expedition was a trip I had been looking forward to since early in the year. The Undersea Explorer, a dive and research adventure liveaboard based out from Port Douglas in Northern Queensland has been supporting scholars for many years now. But only for the month of November each year, the Undersea Explorer travels up to the far north GBR and runs trips to the remote northern reefs such as that around Raine Island.

On the 19th November, I made my way to Cairns and met up with Louise Bernstein, the owner and manager of the Undersea Explorer and avid scholarship supporter. There I boarded a small six seater plan with the crew for the 1.5 hr flight to Lockhart River, a small aboriginal community on the Cape York Peninsular. From there all 28 passengers travelled by bus through the bush to the very small community of Portland Roads and we loaded up the zodiac with people and supplies for our nine day voyage. During this trip I was volunteering as part of the dive crew, I had done a trip on this boat about a year ago and was good to catch up with some familiar faces and be back on ‘the reef’.

The next morning we were on our way to Raine, and soon enough in the distance we could see the famous mining tower over the treeless sand and coral cay. This isolated island is the largest and most important green sea turtle nesting area in the world, with between 14,000 and 20,000 turtles previously recorded nesting in a single night. With the vast numbers of turtles present in the surrounding waters, many of which migrating 2500 kilometres to get back to their island of birth, this is a prime area for tiger sharks. Usually a solitary shark, the tigers aggregate here to feast on the abundant supply of weak adult sea turtles. This forms a base for some very interesting research, catching and tagging the 3-4m sharks then watching their movement patterns via satellite tags. Unfortunately the scheduled tiger shark researcher and underwater cinematographer, Richard Fitzpatrick, was unable to join us on this trip, he has done many years of study on the tiger shark movement patterns, capturing and tagging many individuals around Raine Island. Nevertheless without Richard aboard for the research, it was amazing diving in the waters surrounding the island – with a sloping reef that drops dramatically to hundreds of meters, you never know what is going to come out of the blue! Tiger sharks were seen by people every dive, however I never saw one! Just unlucky I guess, I even jumped in for a late afternoon freedive to try and see one! Apparently one was seen under the boat just before I hoped in, but it didn’t hang around for very long.

On the dives we could see turtle egg shells scattered along the coral covered reef and large green turtles were plentiful, mostly staying on the surface you just had to look up to see them cruising around, although they seemed a bit wary of the divers – do we really look like a tiger shark? The surface intervals were spectacular; we had perfect weather with barely a breath of wind. Looking towards the island we could see about a hundred turtle heads resting on the surface and a few straggling turtles clambering down the beach in the baking sun. That evening was a time to remember when everyone sat on the top deck with drink in hand watching the red sun set as we counted about 150 female turtles returning to shore to lay their clutch of approximately 115 eggs. Green turtles eggs take just over two months to hatch, but these hatchlings have to live a solitary life, facing a constant struggle against a multitude of predators before hopefully surviving to a ripe old age of 45 before returning back to Raine Island to complete such an important life cycle.

The next day we started our voyage south, diving some remote reefs and sites that are very rarely or not dived at all. Reefs such as the Great Detached Reef, North Broken Passage and First Third Mile Opening all producing some great spectacles, whether that be very curious and abundant silvertips and grey whalers, massive schools of trevally, milkfish or barracuda, large dogtooth tuna, healthy corals and blue water dropoffs; it was a beautiful area and the best part of the Great Barrier Reef I have seen. One particular day was at an unknown site (really – we didn’t have a name for it!), on the first dive we had lots of sharks and bumphead parrotfish in the blue water. The next dive, everywhere we looked there was a massive fish – humphead maori wrasse, parrotfish, sweetlips, giant gropers, flowery cod and the biggest and the most abundant population of coral trout I have seen (it is zoned as a marine park if you were wondering), to top it off at the end of the dive, a large curious loggerhead turtle I was filming ran straight into the lens of my video camera (just wish I was recording!!!). The next dive when I was on surface watch, the divers were surrounded by a school of thousands of barracuda, then a school of milkfish, then a school of trevally! These reefs are teeming with life and hopefully they remain relatively untouched and continue in their natural state for future generations.

During the trip, although there was no researchers on board two journalists were there to document these far north reefs. It was funny, I just read both their previous articles on the plane flight to Cairns! Scott Bennett is a Canadadian photographer and journalist for the free on-line X-ray magazine, and Paul Walden, based in Cairns was doing a story on the trip for Scuba Diver Australasia. I became good friends with both and learned  pointers about writing stories, shooting images and working with photoshop. I was Scott’s dive buddy for the majority of the dives and we worked well taking photos and video of whatever happened to swim past. I was kept quite busy during the trip working as part of the dive crew; filling tanks, leading dives, doing surface watch and helping with odd jobs. Working a liveaboard is something I have been considering in the future and the experience did not turn me off, I love being on the water and diving every day!

As we worked our way south, we were back diving some familiar sites on the reef. The Cod Hole, Pixie Pinnacle and my favourite dive site on the reef – Steve’s Bommie were all on fire, and a night dive on Steve’s was the perfect way to finish our nine day voyage. It was a trip that I really enjoyed and only hope that I can get up to dive some of these reefs and do some more exploring in the future! Thanks to the crew, Dave (skipper), Dan (Engineer), Beau (Chef), Ross (Host), Gabriel (Biologist) and the lovely Clare (my dive crew boss) for an awesome trip. Of course this would not be possible without the support of Louise Bernstein, the owner and managing director of the Undersea Explorer.

My far northern adventure was not over just yet (well the diving bit was), as Louise and her friend Annelise Hagan and I took the weekend for a road trip through the Daintree rainforest to Cooktown. Annelise is a British marine scientist and underwater photographer, with her research focused on coral bleaching and reef health. We had some interesting conversations and found another example of a ‘small world’ when we realised we knew many of the same people! The rainforests and coastline of northern QLD is spectacular and was really nice to explore this area, although any water activities were out of the question due to crocodiles and box jellyfish! During my last few days in Port Douglas I organised to meet up with Ben Cropp, he and his son Dean had also just returned from a northern voyage, but with different agenda; documenting and salvage of a B25 Mitchel Bomber plane wreck from 1942. I helped them unload their vessel, it was great to catch up with Ben and Dean, I remember watching many of their documentaries when I was a kid. Their experiences always made me keen to explore and document the marine world, now look where that got me……