Hardy Reef, Two Dives: A Logbook of a Day on the Great Barrier Reef
0658, Port of Airlie
Buddy Check, Logged
Col's briefing slide, verbatim: BCD, weights, releases, air, final check, said out loud, both divers watching each other's hands, every dive, no exceptions, even the fourth dive of the day with someone you've paired with three times already. Skipping it doesn't cost you a dive. It costs someone four minutes alone at 14 metres deciding whether four minutes alone at 14 metres is actually a problem.
Boarding closed at 0700, logged by the deckhand with a clipboard and a highlighter, twenty-six passengers and four crew ticked off against a manifest that had my name spelled two different ways on two different forms. Cruise Whitsundays runs the Reefworld run out of Port of Airlie most mornings, a catamaran with two decks and a dive locker at the stern, and the 0700 slot is the only one that gets divers to Hardy Reef with enough daylight in hand for three tanks.
The dive briefing ran nine minutes over its scheduled ten, which the divemaster, a Yorkshireman named Col, blamed on 'a bloke last Tuesday who filed a diver-missing report on himself.' Short version: he surfaced 40 metres off his buddy's position, popped his safety sausage on schedule, and was picked up by the tender inside four minutes. No injuries, no incident number, just a note in the logbook and a briefing slide that now has his silhouette on it with a red X.
The transit to Hardy Reef is logged at two hours ten on a good sea, two hours flat if the swell's under a metre. It ran two hours eighteen, eighteen minutes down against a schedule nobody but me seemed to be tracking, and the outer reef showed up off the bow a shade of turquoise no filter earns honestly.
0955, First Splash: Anchor Bommie
Giant stride entry, buddy pairs off the platform at intervals Col called out like a departure sequence, ninety seconds apart so nobody surfaced under someone else's fins. My computer logged the drop to 14.2 metres at 0958, three minutes ahead of the briefed descent time, because the current at Anchor Bommie runs you down faster than you plan for.
Anchor Bommie holds its name from a mooring line lost there in the nineties, now grown over with plate coral until you'd need the old chart to find the anchor itself. Staghorn thickets ran out from the bommie's base in every direction, parrotfish working the coral in short, deliberate passes, and a whitetip reef shark held station under an overhang for the whole forty-two minutes we were down, unbothered, like it had seen this shift before.
Bottom time logged at 42 minutes against a briefed 45, three minutes short because my buddy's air ran to 60 bar first and the rule at Cruise Whitsundays is the more conservative tank calls the dive. Safety stop, five metres, three minutes, computer counted down in whole numbers I watched more closely than the fish.
Forty-two minutes at fourteen metres, and the reef kept its own schedule regardless of what we'd briefed.
1230, Second Splash: Turtle Bommie
Six minutes on the same patch of algae before it moved on, logged against nothing in particular.
Surface interval ran 92 minutes against a scheduled 60, extended because the pontoon's lunch service backed up behind a busload of snorkellers off the connecting ferry, and Col re-briefed the second dive standing on a table so the back row could hear him over the blender doing frozen mango smoothies. Turtle Bommie sits four hundred metres north-west of the mooring, a shorter swim than the name suggests once you're actually in the water.
A green turtle was already grazing on a bed of turf algae when we arrived at 11.6 metres, unhurried, working one patch for what my dive computer clocked at six minutes before it moved four metres over and started again. It surfaced once for air at what looked like a completely unbothered pace, no glance at the eight divers hanging in a loose semicircle around it, and returned to the same coral head within ninety seconds.
Second dives run shorter on every operator's table, and Cruise Whitsundays briefs 35 minutes bottom time against the first dive's 45 to keep everyone inside their no-decompression limits. We logged 38, ascent held to nine metres a minute the whole way up, which is slower than most agencies require and exactly what Col's boat insists on regardless of what your certification card says is legal.
1615, Return Leg
Last tanks racked by 1530, gear rinsed in the tubs at the stern, and the catamaran cast off from Reefworld at 1544, six minutes ahead of the posted departure for once. Col read out the day's dive log over the PA on the way in: forty-one divers, eighty-two tank fills, one jellyfish sting treated with vinegar and mild embarrassment, zero missed pickups.
Port of Airlie showed up on schedule at 1758, which put us back at the marina with enough daylight left to watch it go. The Whitsundays sunset over Pioneer Bay ran its usual sequence, orange to red over about eleven minutes by my watch, boats swinging at anchor on the change of tide, no one in a hurry to get off the water even though the day's diving had technically ended two hours earlier.
The Day, Logged
Total time from manifest close to marina return: ten hours, fifty-eight minutes, against an itinerary that promised eleven hours flat. Two minutes under isn't a delay by any definition I used for thirty years in a tower. It's a rounding error, and the only incident on record all day belonged to a jellyfish and a man who filed a report on himself the week before I ever showed up. ■
