Category: Travel

Lady Elliot Island on the Great Barrier Reef: Coral and marine life

Welcome back to Lady Elliot Island, a coral quay on The Great Barrier Reef, Queensland, Australia. The Barrier Reef, as everyone knows, is the mighty reef down which Nemo’s dad swam to find his little son. We flew here from Perth

Out on the Lagoon: But what do you really want to see at a coral lagoon? The coral, of course. The glass bottomed boats leave from the beach at the end of the runway that runs through the middle of the island (see aerial viewing pic below)

Almost all the trees you see here have been planted in the past 30 years during the patient restoration process – it had been stripped down for the guano in the years before that.

Those buildings marked in this photo are cabins of the Eco Resort. See how close they are to the sea. We stayed in one of those. They are not fancy because this is a low-impact eco resort. Our glass bottomed boat took us further out to just above the main reef where the water gets more blue and you can see the whole island from here.

 Out and out we went. In the deeper water above the reef we went snorkelling with the boat crew keeping on eye on us so we felt quite safe. The staff on Lady Elliot Island must have the best job in Australia, in the world.

We saw all kinds of fish and a huge groper, beach sharks, a manta ray and more.

THE REEF WALK. The staff members of the Eco-restort at Lady Elliot Island lead the groups out at low tide. Of course, the first thing they tell you about is safety. If you scrape against the coral you will get a nasty cut and likely an infection. We put on our reef walking shoes. These are thick soled plastic slip-on shoes to protect your feet.

The protective gear for the rest of the body simply consisted of a pole to lean on, like one of those poles that nordic walkers use. We walked in the sandy bits that you can see in the pictures, staying clear of the coral. Staying upright while clutching a camera in one hand and a pole in the other was tricky to do especially when the tide turned and the water started surging.

There are all kinds of creatures, many best seen during the reef walk at low tide. We took these pictures with an ordinary camera aiming down at the water. The water was clear, as you can see, although later in our walk it got murky as the tide came back in.

The coral is not easy to see in the deeper water especially as the swell builds, and from the boat itself this is about all you can make out (below). The startling blues of the starfish are clearly visible though.

And coral of many kinds: ‘brains’, spiky ones, and some like manicured shrubs and huge ‘brocolii’ like creatures.

Once back on shore we saw this little fella. He was just turtling along right among the people on the beach! It is after all, a turtle’s home, not a peoples’ home.

” I’m just a turtle,
Turtling along,
A happy green turtle,
Burbling a song…”

We settled on a deck chair as evening fell. Would the big female loggerhead turtles clamber up this very beach in the night? Yes, they did! But that’s for another post.

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Lady Elliot Island on The Great Barrier Reef: Flying there

Lady Elliot Island is a coral quay on the south end of The Great Barrier Reef. The tiny island has featured on an episode of David Attenborough’s TV series, Great Barrier Reef  not only because of the bird life, turtles and manta rays there but also because it is a conservation success story.

Where is Lady Elliot Island? Zoom in on a map of Australia. Find Hervey Bay in Queensland. Lady Elliot Island lies 1230 km NE of Hervey Bay.

Map showing where Lady Elliot Island is relative to Brisbane
map showing where Lady Elliot Island is relative to Hervey Bay and K'gari

Just getting there was an adventure for us. We flew all day from Perth in Western Australia to Brisbane in a Boeing 737 (comfort and movies) then boarded a turbo prop aircraft to reach Hervey Bay (rattling and sandwiches). Then the planes got even smaller. We flew out from Hervey Bay on a Beechcraft B 200 and returned on a Cesna 210 Centurion.  

In the the photo below you can see the navigating thingy-gum. It shows our position and the red line shows our flight path. Yes, we were right behind the pilot.

Our flight from the coastal town of  Hervey Bay to Lady Elliot Island took 80 minutes. We headed out over the sea and then northerly between the mainland and K’Gari Island, the big one in the distance (below). It’s the largest sand island in the world.

Beyond Fraser Island is The Pacific Ocean where the turtles roam for years on the currents after laying their eggs on Lady Elliot and on many other islands of The Barrier Reef. Just look at those blues!

The colours and swirls and patterns of coastal seas are just too blue for words. And these pics were taken through slightly fuzzy perspex windows. In fact they looked even bluer. We flew past K’gari (formerly Fraser Island) and had a good view of the little islands and sand banks too.

See that little island in the foreground of the picture above? Imagine an island like that all for oneself.  You could just sit there in the shade by the sand all day simply being  stunned by the colours of the sea. Cyclones could be a bother though.

Thar she blows! Lady Elliot Island hoves into sight (above). You can see the main coral reef  where the deep dark blue ocean is breaking to white tops. Within the reef lies the lagoon. You can do reef walks at low tide and snorkel there at high tide. You see green turtles and reef sharks and all kinds of starfish and fish and lots of coral. The island is so small that, as you can see, the airstrip goes right across the middle, one side to the other.

If you look through the blur of the propellor (above) you can see two bands of blue at the end of the landing strip? That’s the lagoon, and after the lagoon you see the dark deep blue of the Pacific Ocean.  We were later to see turtles right there where the  runway strip ends. 

And there is the Eco Resort on Lady Elliot Island. It’s deliberately low key and low impact. No vehicles other than for the staff to do their work. The staff are very involved in caring for the island. They are always planting more trees and counting the birds nests and the turtle nests

The island was actually a conservation disaster until some decades ago, and since then it has been restored tree by tree. More about Lady Elliot Island in future posts.

PLEASE FOLLOW US At Baffled Bear Books .
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You can also follow on Amazon and on GoodReads. We are also on Instagram, and Tiktok, and Spotify and Mastodon (link is @mawsonbear@mastodon.au. )

Mark is guardian and blundering typist for Mawson, one of this bright world’s few published bears. Of Mawson’s first book, ‘It’s A Bright World To Feel Lost In’, a reviewer said, ‘Reading this book is like receiving a great big hug of reassurance and a huge hot chocolate with fluffy marshmallows.’