Snorkeling in The Great Barrier Reef

Think of the Great Barrier Reef reef as a single, very old, living thing.  The outer reef is as long as the distance from Maine to Miami.  It’s an 18,000-year old, twelve-hundred mile organism, where fifteen hundred species of fish have made their home.  And I’m going snorkeling (for the first time in my life) there. 

I said at the start of my blog I have always been a wanna-be adventurer.  It’s one thing to spend days sunning by the ocean.  It’s another to put on a snorkel mask and swim in forty feet of ocean.

So as I board the boat to Agincourt Reef, I am thinking,  “I have to try…”

I’m listening to ‘snorkeling for beginners’, but I’m thinking,  “I’ll put the gear on, put my face in the water for a second, and then just get out and go find the glass-bottom boat.”  That’s my plan.  

We arrive at an elaborate pontoon, one with lockers, changing rooms, dining facilities, a bar, and a roped off area of water for snorkelers who want a boundary to enhance their feeling of safety.  It's not a restriction--just a sort of 'guide'.    Except for the part where I’m going to be in the water, this all looks fine.

So I begin to enact my plan.  I don the mask and snorkel, breathe (yup, that works), creep down the steps into the water, put on my fins.  I’m just going to put my face in the water, look, and then get out.  That’s all.  Just put my face in the water, look , and then get….

I put my face in the water, look, and am hypnotized.   I stare in wonder—multihued coral shapes and towers, sea life of every size and color, schools of tiny silver fish moving in perfect choreographed unison, feathery plants, an octopus, sea horse, groups of iridescent blue fish, zebra fish—it’s just amazing.

Here’s something I learn right away.  You can’t talk with a snorkel in your mouth.  Not even to say, ‘It’s just amazing!”

Agincourt Reef, taken with a disposable (!) camera

Nothing, not all the Jacques Cousteau specials, not the aquarium, not the beaches of my summers, nothing, could have prepared me for all the life, activity, colors, and shapes that I see under the water’s surface.  I immediately take all the pictures in my disposable underwater camera, rush back onto the pontoon to stow it, and return to the water so I can just swim and gawk.

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Next:  a little careless