Tregrosse Reef and the Diamond Islets

The Australian Coral Sea territory is 780,000 square kilometres. In the 1960s various nations started to do things in this area (including searching for oil), so Great Britain and Australia had a discussion about which country actually owned the area. Great Britain gave up all claims to the area, so in 1969, Australia formally declared it an Australian external territory. Later, the French decided to transfer ownership of a couple of reefs near New Caledonia to Australia, and a couple of reefs to the south were added to the territory.

Coral Sea Marine Park is the third largest marine park in the world at 989,836 square kilometres (the Great Barrier Reef marine park is only 334,400 square kilometres). It’s somewhat larger than the territory, partly because it includes some reefs that the Torres Strait Islanders traditionally use, which are part of Queensland.

The area is virtually uninhabited. There is an array of weather stations throughout the coral sea, and the one on Willis Island is manned by about five people, but that’s it.

Today we started by going to Tregrosse Reef. Unfortunately, they are having trouble raising the anchor (it’s taking hours rather than minutes), and they didn’t want to lower it there, because they weren’t sure how deep it would go. There’s a weather pylon at Tregrosse Reef, but no cay.

We then went to the West Diamond Islet. We could see the waves lashing the shore, and we weren’t going there.

The brown boobies and frigate birds engulfed the ship.

So we continued on, and passed North Diamond Islet, where the waves were also lashing the shore.

However, we soon came to East Diamond Islet, which looked very nice. You can see the weather station pylon on it.

You can see the birds coming out to greet us.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much coral near the beach, there was a strong current where the coral was that would have sent us out to sea, so we didn’t snorkel, but we did walk along the beach, where there were an enormous number of turtle tracks, 

and nesting masked boobies and frigates.

I was photographing all the turtle tracks and ran out of camera battery (it was a wet landing, so I took my underwater camera which wasn’t fully charged), so I didn’t photograph all the birds nesting in all the trees. The frigates and brown boobies nest in trees while the masked boobies nest on the sand.