Key takeaways
- Green turtles appear repeatedly in this operator's photographs and in guest accounts of the trip.
- Whitetip and blacktip reef sharks are recorded here, and they are entirely uninterested in snorkellers.
- The two things everybody hopes to see up close, and both are reliably present on these sites.
- A guide who knows a site will show you things you would swim straight past on your own.
Are there turtles in the Great Barrier Reef
There are, and this operator's own photographs show them repeatedly: green turtles resting on sand beside a bommie, gliding just above the coral, moving slowly across the reef floor with a snorkeller above.
Green turtles are the species most commonly seen at these sites. They graze on algae and seagrass, they surface to breathe every few minutes, and they are remarkably tolerant of snorkellers who keep a respectful distance.
Guests write about them more than anything else on the trip. Several describe going home with photographs of turtles to show family, which is the crew's GoPro doing the work at exactly the moment somebody wanted it. They are also the animal most likely to change how somebody feels about the whole day. A turtle at close range, entirely unbothered by you, is the encounter people describe years afterwards.
The reef sharks
Guests record them. Whitetip and blacktip reef sharks are resident on the outer reef here, usually a metre or so long, patrolling the deeper edges of a site or resting under an overhang.
They are not interested in you. Reef sharks feed on fish and crustaceans and treat a snorkeller as a large uninteresting object to be avoided. Seeing one is a highlight rather than a problem, and guests describe it as luck.
The Great Barrier Reef sees enormous numbers of snorkellers every year and shark incidents involving them are effectively unheard of. The animals people are properly cautious about here are jellyfish in season, not sharks.
Great Barrier Reef fish and the small things
Clownfish are the ones everybody wants, and they are here, sheltering in anemones with purple or pink tips. They are small, they dart, and they are almost impossible to photograph without practice, which is another argument for letting the crew do it.
Beyond them: striped reef fish hovering over coral, small schooling species massed above staghorn thickets, angelfish and parrotfish working the reef top. The colour on a healthy outer reef site is genuinely startling on a first encounter.
Blue sea stars are the other thing guests photograph constantly, draped across coral heads in the shallows in a blue so vivid it looks artificial. They are common here and easy to spot. None of the small stuff requires deep water either. Much of the best colour on these sites sits within a couple of metres of the surface, which is exactly where a snorkeller is looking anyway.
A green turtle gliding above the coral in clear water at the reef site
Giant clams
These are worth going looking for. A giant clam can reach over a metre across and live for a century, and the mantle it exposes when open is patterned in electric blues, greens and browns that seem to belong to a different animal entirely.
The colours come from algae living inside the mantle tissue, which is the same partnership that builds the coral around them. The clam farms its own food and the reef works on the same principle throughout.
This operator's photographs show several, wedged among hard corals with their mantles open. They do not move and they do not react, so they are the easiest thing on the reef to look at properly.
The coral itself
Easy to overlook when you are looking for animals, and the actual reason the reef exists. The sites here carry staghorn thickets, plate corals stacked on slopes, boulder and brain corals, and soft corals that move with the surge.
Coral is an animal rather than a plant, and a reef is a colony of millions of them building a limestone structure over centuries. What you are floating above is simultaneously a living community and a piece of geology.
Outer reef sites carry better coral than inshore ones, which is the practical reason this trip runs out rather than staying close. Water quality, light and distance from the coast all favour it. It is worth spending a few minutes just looking at one patch rather than covering ground. A single coral head holds more going on than an entire swim across open sand, once your eye adjusts to the scale.
Dolphin whale watching and other visitors
Not the point of this trip, but the water between Cairns and the reef holds more than the reef does. Dolphins are seen from boats on this crossing, and dwarf minke whales pass through in the winter months.
Seabirds work the same water, and flying fish break out ahead of a fast boat regularly enough that most guests see them. None of this is promised and all of it happens.
The crossing is not dead time in either direction. Watching the water on the way out is how people spot the things that were never on anybody's list, and it makes the transit considerably shorter.
How much you see depends on the guide
More than on luck, at least for the small things. A turtle is visible to anybody. A clownfish in an anemone, a giant clam among coral of the same colour, or a reef shark resting under a ledge are all things you swim past unless somebody points.
That is exactly what the guides do, and it is why the guiding shows up in reviews more than the reef does. Guests describe every species being named for them, including for a ten year old who kept pointing at things.
Stay near a guide, follow where they indicate, and ask afterwards about anything you could not identify. Ninety minutes with somebody who knows a site is worth several hours of swimming around one on your own.
