Destinations

For the sake of simplification, Northern Queensland includes diving activities from Cape York to the Coral Sea and south to Lady Elliot Island. The most spectacular diving is on the Great Barrier Reef. The warm tropical waters host world-class dive experiences and abundance of marine life, including turtles, rays, manta rays, sharks, nudibranchs and a profusion of tropical fish. In season there are the Minke Whales and other megafauna including sharks and rays. Famous dive destinations like Cairns are also the departure point via liveaboard to the amazing Coral Sea. Similarly, Townsville is the departure point for both day and liveaboard diving including famous wreck of the Yongala and visits to the Museum of Underwater Art. For divers with a sense of adventure and a little more time on their hands, there’s even the opportunity to join an exploration trip into the seldom visited reaches of the Far Northern Reefs, close to the tip of Cape York Peninsula. Usually scheduled for the months of April and November, these expeditions coincide with the start of the turtle breeding season around Raine Island, Detached and Ashmore reefs.

The GBRMP stretches for more than 2,300 kilometres along the Queensland coast and covers around 344,400 square kilometres (e.g. 70 million football fields). It is the world’s largest living thing and the largest World Heritage site. It is made up of 3000 individual reefs, 600 islands and 70 coral cays scattered along the edge of the continental shelf. The GBRMP, and the coral reefs that extends outside the park, cover almost the entire length of the Queensland coast and is filled with thousands of brightly coloured species of marine life. There are 1,625 types of fish, 4,000 types of molluscs, 350 types of echinoderms, 133 varieties of sharks and rays, 5 of the 6 known species of turtle and 600 types of hard and soft corals for snorkellers and scuba divers to encounter.

Out beyond the Great Barrier Reef lies the Coral Sea; a remote oceanic wilderness where - 100 to 150 nautical miles offshore - isolated pinnacles crested by low-lying cays and atolls rise thousands of feet from the sea floor. Featuring sheer walls that plummet into the depths below, massive soft coral formations that are among the largest in the world, and underwater visibility that’s consistently between 30m (100ft) and 40m (132ft), Coral Sea destinations like Holmes, Bougainville and Osprey reefs are the stuff of which diving dreams are made. Offering spectacular opportunities for underwater photographers, it’s at places like these that divers are likely to encounter the large pelagics like manta rays, huge schools of barracuda, dog-tooth tuna and at sites like North Horn, on Osprey Reef – huge congregations of sharks, including white tips, silver tips, grey whalers, and hammerheads can be found.

For the sake of simplification, Southern Queensland includes diving activities from Lady Elliot Island and Hervey Bay to tweed River on our southern state boundary. Offering some spectacular diving that provides excellent alternatives to the Northern Great Barrier Reef. The cooler subtropical waters offer a myriad of different experiences to those of the tropical waters in the north. World-class wreck dives, reefs and vast rock walls boast abundant marine life, with turtles, stingrays, manta rays, leopard, wobbegong and grey nurse sharks, nudibranchs and large schools of fish populating the various dive sites.