This trip is not for someone who wants to pick between eight excursions each morning. It is for someone who prefers one thing done for several days in a row, and is willing to pay the price of a small island with a single place to stay.
01 Why the south and not Cairns
The difference is not the quality of the reef, it is the distance. From Cairns the outer reef is one or two hours of sailing away, so the day begins and ends with a transfer and the actual time in the water is a few fixed hours. On a cay the transfer happens once: on arrival.
There is a second difference, and it is seasonal. The tropical coast has dangerous jellyfish from November to May; the southern end of the reef lies outside the tropics and that problem weighs far less. In exchange you gain something else: this is turtle and whale country.
02 Lady Elliot: an airstrip on the coral
Lady Elliot is the southernmost cay of the Great Barrier Reef: 45 hectares of sand and low vegetation some 80 kilometres north-east of Bundaberg. It is the only coral cay on the reef with an airstrip, and that strip is the only way in, because there is no ferry. The flight takes about twenty-five minutes from Bundaberg and about forty from Hervey Bay.
The island is ringed by a shallow coral platform that partly dries at low tide. It is credited with more than 1,200 marine species, and what made its name are the manta rays, which gather there drawn by the plankton. The green turtles are residents, not a lucky coincidence.
What is worth understanding before booking is the scale. You can walk around the island in a little over half an hour. There is no town. There is one place to stay. If that sounds thin, this is not your trip.
03 Heron: twenty hectares and a research station
Heron lies further north and further out: some 80 kilometres offshore from Gladstone, with twenty hectares of land. You get there by boat, about two hours to the jetty, or by helicopter.
It has something Lady Elliot does not: a marine research station running since 1951, the facility that has studied the reef continuously for longer than any other. You feel it in the atmosphere of the island, where the lodging and the fieldwork sit side by side, and it explains why the after-dinner conversation here tends to be about corals.
The access channel is dredged through the coral platform, and the tide is in charge: at low water the platform is almost dry and the boat cannot come in at just any hour. It is the first practical lesson of the place, and also the first time you grasp how shallow a real reef is.
04 The two mainland stops
Both cays link well with two mainland stops that cover the other half of the calendar.
The first is Mon Repos, next to Bundaberg. From November to January the female turtles come ashore to nest on that beach, and from December to March the hatchlings emerge. The visits are at night and guided, in groups and in shifts, with everything that implies: it is not a solitary encounter on the sand, and the wait can be long.
The second is Hervey Bay. The humpbacks use it as a stop on the way back south between July and October, with the bulk in August and September. Because it is a resting place and not a corridor, the sightings are of animals that stay, and that changes the nature of the trip entirely: nothing is chased.
The two stops have a calendar problem. The whales are there from July to October and the turtles from November to March: they do not overlap. You have to choose one, and that choice drags the date of the whole trip with it.
05 What doing it this way costs
The first toll is rigidity. Each island has one place to stay and one way in, with few departures a day. If the weather turns there is no alternative: you wait. Leave a spare day before an international flight.
The second is price. With no competition on the island and the transfer on a dedicated flight or boat, the nightly cost is nothing like a Cairns hotel. The compensation is that the reef is not charged separately: there is no daily excursion to add on.
And there is a deeper renunciation: nothing else happens here. There is no town, no listings, no second beach to try if this one does not convince you. What there is is a reef starting ten metres from the door and an island that runs out quickly. If that seems enough, you can leave the rest of the state alone.
Dsdugan California, for the traveller who swaps the coast road for the dry side of the range.
Marklchaves Bali, for the traveller who swaps the whole south for three bases in the north and east.
José Luis Filpo Cabana