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Heron Island, the Great Barrier Reef, and other ways to rough it beyond Sydney 2000
Live and Let Dive
Feathering your own Reef nest
SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER are the prime months for diving the Great Barrier Reef. But no matter when you visit—Heron Island Resort (61-7-4972-9055; www.HeronIsland.com) is open year-round—book your room at least a month in advance.
GETTING THERE: Airfare to Sydney from L.A. during Olympics season—late August to early October—costs $1,500 to $2,000 round-trip on Qantas (800-227-4500; www.qantas.com); add $425 for a New York departure. To continue to Heron Island, hop a
two-hour domestic flight from Sydney to Gladstone, 700 miles north. Qantas charges about $390 round-trip if you book from the U.S. In Gladstone, hitch a 30-minute helicopter ride with Marine Helicopters ($260 round-trip; call the resort) to Heron. Or take the two-and-a-half-hour catamaran shuttle ($50 each way; call the resort), which leaves
Gladstone every day at 11 A.M.
DIVING: Four-dive packages, including tanks and weights, run $105; eight dives go for $189. The Heron Island Resort dive shop rents wetsuits, masks, and other gear.
WHERE TO STAY: Room rates at Heron Island Resort start at $108 per person per night, including all meals and such perks as low-tide reef walks and reef-creature talks by island naturalists.
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"MATES, I PROMISE you'll be swimming with sharks today," said Gazza, our ginger-goateed divemaster. Dressed in a full-length purple wetsuit, the late-twentyish native of Perth was steering our diveboat toward one of the Great Barrier Reef's famous dive sites, a 20-foot-high coral pillar called the Bommie, located only two minutes by boat from Heron Island.
Heron is a 42-acre speck of a cay at the Great Barrier Reef's southern tip and is home to the only dive resort located directly on the reef—smack in the middle of some of the world's most fertile sites and hundreds of miles from the reef's crowded northern end.
The island is also just four hours by plane and helicopter— a short jaunt by Australian standards—from Sydney, where I'd been safely surrounded by skyscrapers that morning. I would be spending the next seven days on Heron, diving with Gazza and a rotating cast of others from Germany, Canada, Italy, and Australia each morning and afternoon,
and napping on Heron's white-sand beach in between.
When the boat came to a halt, I peered down into the water and could make out darting marine life.
"Mate, I bloody guarantee sharks," Gazz enthused, singling me out. "Money back if you don't."
"Oh, that's OK," I said, trying to sound casual. "No hurry."
One skittish German woman on board considered out loud that she might sit this dive out, but Gazza—his nickname is a common Australian substitute for "Gary"—was already sucking on his regulator, so we didn't have much choice but to follow. He was proven right. Moments after we sank to the ocean floor 65 feet down, two black-tipped reef sharks
headed straight for us and swooped to within five breathtaking feet of me before joining about ten others in the not-too-distant background.
Most Great Barrier Reef divers have similarly benign shark experiences. In fact, no one diving the waters surrounding Heron Island has ever been so much as nibbled by the five-foot reef sharks or the carpet and epaulette sharks also found there. I quickly got over my nerves and learned to take pleasure in less-sharp-toothed details, like mottled Maori
wrasses, black-and-yellow moorish idols, and hundreds of other fish. A manta ray flapped like a giant black bat over my head, and three loggerhead turtles glided past in military formation.
Heron Island Resort was founded in 1932 as a fishing destination; scuba was introduced in the 1960s, just after the sport made its Australian debut, by the resort manager, a former champion wrestler whose hobby was marine biology. When all but the northern tip of the 1,250-mile-long reef—which consists of 3,000 individual reefs stretching from
southeast Queensland north to Papua New Guinea—was designated Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in 1983, further development on the reef was strictly forbidden.
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