Reef

The next day I was booked on an excursion to a pontoon on Moore Reef. The tourist wharf was full of boats ready to go.

The Great Barrier Reef is made up of over three thousand separate reefs. Some of them are around islands that were part of the mainland during the last ice age. 

Others form on the ocean floor where there’s limestone for the coral to attach to. These gradually grow into reefs with nothing really above water, like Moore Reef. Eventually, they grow further and develop a cay, with sand on it in the middle of the reef. These cays become sandy tropical islands.

In 2011, cyclone yasi hit the area - an enormous, slow moving, top severity cyclone, the worst for over 100 years. It went between the two biggest population centres of the region, Cairns and Townsville so they weren’t as badly damaged as other towns in the area, but it destroyed 94% of the coral on the reefs in the area, including this one. However, in the years since, just about all the coral has grown back. 

A number of companies have been given permits to place a pontoon on specific sites at specific reefs in the Great Barrier Reef. I think that there were about four different pontoons at Moore reef that I noticed as we were getting there. Each company is allowed to rope off a specific section of their area for people to snorkel and dive in. The company I went with had an underwater observation area on the pontoon and two other levels. They also had a glass bottomed boat (you sit in the boat looking down through the floor at the reef) and a semi submersible boat (we were underwater with glass walls on both sides of us). These were outside the snorkelling area, but still inside the area available to the company. There were other activities available for a fee - guided diving and snorkelling outside the snorkelling area, helicopter rides, and a couple of other things. I just did the activities that were part of the package, and it was enough (I tossed up about the helicopter). 

The snorkelling area included a lot of very good coral. Unfortunately, it was a bit choppy, so my snorkel kept on getting water in. This tired me out. Otherwise, I might have just gone snorkelling.

 

I was glad I went on both the submersible boat 

and the glass bottomed boat. They both included commentary from experts. 

The submersible boat went over some areas where the destroyed coral was very visible and you could see places where it was growing back but the debris was still visible underneath. We also went over an enormous brain coral which is about a thousand years old.

There were enormous schools of fish too but they were hard to see as they were the same colour as the water.