January 2018 on the Great Barrier Reef
EPIC
By Captain Trevor Jackson
Mike Ball and I have very little in common. For one, he’s a bit handsome…even my OWN kids think I look like SHREK! He’s reasonably well spoken while my language could pull the skin off a custard!
One thing that we do have in common though, is that we’ve both been diving for a very long time. And when you’ve been around the block a few dozen times, you tend to underreact to things. A dive that has almost everyone buzzing; we oldies might describe as “Yeh, okay, not bad…yeh it was alright”. I guess what I’m saying is that after a while it takes more and more to impress…and so what happened up north this year on our Turtle Spectacular was…. well, unexpected. You see, Mike and I finally had something in common…on this particular expedition, we both saw our respective…”BEST SITE EVER”
For Mike, it came on day three. After steaming north for 400 miles we reached Great Detached Reef and on the first dive of the day we were on a site we’d discovered a year or two back called ‘OH MY BOMBIE’. Strange name I know, but once you’ve dived it… you get the message! The place is ‘next level’, off the map cool!!! I’m not even going to try to describe it except to say… Bombie up from 40 metres to about twelve….marine life BONANZA.
Suffice to say, if a geezer with as many runs on the board as MB reckons it’s the best site he’s ever seen, it’s probably worth a lap.
A couple of days late it was my turn to be impressed…this time with a site called EPIC. And since I can’t resist the cliché, here it comes…’Epic by name, Epic by nature’ [sheesh almost gagged writing that but it is just simply true]. I don’t know how deep the water is around ‘Epic’ but it was dark and mysterious enough to impress the crap out of this old tech head. And then it comes up as sheer as the Swiss Alps to a plateau on top which is roughly a couple of tennis courts across. The coral garden on top? Well if there is a god, this is what he intended coral to look like! I got out of the water almost speechless that, so much could be seen in so little time in so little an area – EPIC!
Like I said it takes a fair bit to get Mike and I jumping up and down on the dive deck like excited kids but there we were…. like teenyboppers. If you’d like to revisit your youth, and feel that thrill again, join us next year at the Far Northern reefs. I promise you it will be…………..EPIC
