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salon.com > Travel March 4, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/travel/feature/2000/03/04/reef Aussie epiphany How I learned to stop hurrying and love the Great Barrier Reef. - - - - - - - - - - - - Outside, the tropical Queensland evening is balmy and fragrant. Brilliantly colored parrots and myna birds rustle in the fronds of the coconut palms and, if you look closely, you might catch sight of the region's otherworldly flying foxes as they begin their nocturnal visit to the mango trees littering the roads and lawns with their luscious fruit. A few blocks away, the Reef Hotel Casino glitters and, even closer by, international hordes of jolly, youthful hostel guests have piled into the pubs to listen to blues bands imported from Chicago and suck up ample quantities of Fosters and XXXX ale. And they'll still wake up rosy-cheeked and ready for action in the morning. So why has a crowd of 20 or 30 people chosen to perch on folding chairs, mugs of weak milky tea balanced on their knees, in a rather Spartan room with nothing but a slide show and a lean Irishman with a fanatical gleam in his eye by way of diversion? The Irishman stalks back and forth across a low plywood platform. He leans forward; he crouches; he stretches tall. His voice ranges from tent revival preacher boom to Monty Python lunatic screech as he veers from thundering pronouncements to the high-pitched tone he uses to talk about the "teeny-tiny microscopic animals" who built the titanic wonder we've all come to this remote place to see: the Great Barrier Reef. The reef is a Mecca of sorts for scuba divers. I've traveled all the way from New York, spending almost 24 hours on or between planes, to get here. More experienced diver friends were silent for a few moments when I'd told them where I was going -- did they think the trip would be wasted on me, a mere novice and someone likely to spend most of my underwater time fussing with my mask, equalizing the pressure in my ears and double-checking my air gauge? The reef, as Paddy Colwell, the Irishman, reminds us, is enormous. Its area is larger than that of Great Britain, half the size of Texas, and it's visible from the moon. Every bit of it was created by those teeny-tiny microscopic creatures, the animals that make up the myriad varieties of coral. Colwell reminds us several times, pinching up a fold of skin from under his tricep, that "plants live in the flesh" of those animals, a statement that never fails to send an unpleasantly prickly shudder down the back of my neck. All very well for the coral, which thrives in a symbiotic relationship with those plants, but the thought of it gives me the creeps. This is only my second scuba-diving trip, and I am sorely in need of Colwell's teachings because I made my inaugural dives in Hawaii. However impressive the Great Barrier Reef may be in theory, when you're diving, the most you can see of this discernible-from-the-moon structure is the patch immediately in front of your mask. And unlike the dive spots in Hawaii -- where we could hardly turn around without tripping over moray eels, octopuses, sea turtles, rays, shrimp, dolphins and hallucinatory clouds of bright butterfly fish -- the parts of the reef I've visited so far seem relatively underpopulated. What I need to do, as Colwell explains, is look closer, look slower and look smarter. He passes around the chalky skeletons of various corals, teaching us their names: brain coral, staghorn coral, boulder coral, fan coral, all of which, in a rare example of typological good sense, look exactly like the things they're named after. He explains that if you wait patiently by a pockmarked specimen of brain coral, the tubeworms you frightened into hiding with your typical, blundering human approach will reemerge. The worms live in burrows right in the brain coral (another prickly shudder at that one), but they stick out their frilly heads to sweep tiny microscopic food particles from the water. Colwell, a marine biologist and a native of Dublin, later tells me the eventful, if somewhat confusing, story of how he came to be doing an educational slide lecture called Reef Teach six nights a week in downtown Cairns. It involves teaching high school biology students in Ireland and ex-prisoners in Boston, diving with BSAC (British Sub-Aqua Club) in "zero visibility bog lakes in Ireland," taking a courier flight to Melbourne, trying to open a pub in the Outback, discovering he'd lost all his savings through an investment outfit called a building society, driving backpackers around in a van and becoming a dive master in Queensland where he quickly grew outraged at the divers' lack of sound marine biological knowledge. His narrative is laced with what are no doubt well-grounded diatribes against tour operators, marine park administrators, agribusiness, ecotourism and, understandably, building societies. One by one Colwell can testily count off the common misperceptions burdening visitors to the reef. They think that sharks must keep moving or they'll die. They think that giant clams live to be 200 years old ("ridiculous!") and will clamp down on the extremities of divers until they drown. They think that barracuda are dangerous to humans. In fact, most of the creatures people assume pose a threat to divers -- sharks, manta rays, giant clams, barracuda -- are harmless. The waters off tropical North Queensland do contain their share of deadly nasties, but these tend to be decidedly unglamorous: the venomous box jelly fish, the stone fish, the pretty little cone shells that you must never, ever pick up. Yet, for those who look closer, glamour isn't hard to find. If Colwell's your dive guide, he promises to show you 1) fish changing color, 2) coral changing color, 3) cleaning stations where sea creatures stop by for a scrub-down courtesy of parasite and algae-eating fish and 4) fish swimming upside down. On three nights per year, he can show you the only animal mating ritual visible from outer space, the mass spawning of the reef's coral. This, alas, is not one of those nights, but Reef Teach does sell a video of the event (complete with New Age music), showing the coral releasing vast pink clouds of eggs and sperm. It's not just the invertebrates who carry on orgiastically. "Lots of coral fish change not only color, but sex as well," explains Colwell, conjuring up images of flamboyant, transsexual marine revels that would put San Francisco to shame. And the pageant even has a villain (besides humanity and its predictable depredations): the spectacularly sinister Crown of Thorns starfish. This is not your garden variety seaside charmer -- believe me, no one will ever manufacture darling little pastel guest soaps in the shape of these beasts. The army-green Crown of Thorns has up to 21 legs, each one bristling with venomous reddish spines. It looks like it just arrived from a planet near Alpha Centauri with an extensive array of bad intentions. It has repulsive eating habits, ejecting its stomach out of its mouth to envelop a likely patch of coral, releasing enzymes and absorbing the digested microscopic animals, plants and all, leaving behind nothing but the bleached skeleton. The voracious Crown of Thorns has reached plague proportions in the Great Barrier Reef, laying waste to vast areas of coral. Reef Teach has a somewhat uneasy, semi-official relationship with most of the area's dive-boat operators, a situation that Colwell attributes to the fact that he zips blindingly from 0 to 60 on the ol' exasperometer whenever he hears dive guides "leave out very important facts" about the reef's flora and fauna. But every boat I boarded had at least one snorkler or diver who'd seen Colwell's show and couldn't stop praising it, how it had made the baffling, alien undersea world not just more comprehensible, but even more beautiful. I was one of them. I learned to stop rushing through the towers of coral. I saw the crumbly trail of sand emitted from the back end of a shimmering turquoise parrot fish and knew it for the remains of his coral dinner. I got close to a long strand of gorgonian coral and spotted a dainty, bugged-eyed gobi fish racing up and down its length, the only traveling the little guy will ever do; he reminded me of a Samuel Beckett character. I swam through a meadow of violet staghorn coral and, when I spotted a Crown of Thorns munching on one corner of it, knew that in perhaps a week or two it would be a wasteland of white. That giant clam with a shell-span of nearly 3 feet didn't faze me a bit. Hovering over the undulating tentacles of a stinging anenome, I saw a piebald clownfish (a notorious sex-changer and immune to the anenome's venom) luxuriating in perfect safety within them like a starlet among her bodyguards. I drifted slowly past a massive boulder coral and watched it blossom with dozens of purple spiral frills: Christmas-tree tube worms, looking like the world's most festive cocktail umbrellas. I noticed that every fish I encountered stared at me with an expression that I can only describe as aghast, and remembered what Colwell had said: "These fish are at home." How would I react if they suddenly appeared in my living room, scrutinizing me as I munched my morning bagel? I suspect they'd find me with much the same demeanor. I even saw fish and coral change color, though I never saw anyone swimming upside down -- except that is for Trevor, a diver from Yorkshire, England, who first spotted the clownfish and graciously pointed them out to me. Trevor is one of those stupendously modest guys who professed to be a beginning diver just like me. Turns out, though, that while he hadn't strapped on an air tank in quite a few years, he once traveled the globe, diving in some of the world's most legendary reefs -- including the Red Sea -- and in some kind of professional capacity. (I imagined him dropping from a helicopter for an undersea reconnaissance mission.) Trevor revealed himself to be an old hand by following Colwell's recommendations to a T. Every time I turned around, I saw him drifting motionless and serene, his arms folded to keep his gauges from banging against the fragile coral. He knew how to take it slow and look carefully, all right. Not only did he spot the pretty little clownfish, but once we got back to the boat he told me he'd spotted a couple of turkey fish -- highly venomous, visually stunning porcupine-like fish with permanent scowls who look (in photos at least) like traditional Japanese warriors -- lurking in a little cave on another dive. I didn't come back from the reef
brimming with outrageous tales of
spotting hammerhead sharks, frolicking
with dolphins, hand-feeding a giant
potato cod or hitching a ride on a manta
ray. Those kinds of stories are like
trophies that veteran divers haul out at
the end of the day as the boat chugs
slowly back to the dock, and my
rapturous descriptions of tube worms
aren't likely to impress anyone. But
thanks to Colwell (and Trevor) I came
back to New York with a philosophy
rather than a fistful of yarns: Slow
down and look closely. And who knows, it
might prove as fruitful in Gotham as it
did on the Great Barrier Reef.
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