DIVE LOG AUSTRALASIA FEB 2025 ISSUE 410

Far out in the far North

Article and photos by Dr. Terry and Cathie Cum mins.

Leopard shark

Far Out in the Far North – Part 4 Travel Blog Living in Cairns and deeply entrenched in the local diving community, we kept hearing wonderful stories about the amazing diving opportunities in the very far north of Queensland. We are not talking this time about the magical diving to be experienced within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park north of Cairns, but rather the reefs that are only accessible part of the year by liveaboard vessels operating out of Horn Island 791 kilometres (492 Miles) to the north of Cairns. Doing some research we found that our friends at Mike Ball Dive Expeditions (MBDE) do just a few exploratory trips per year aboard Spoilsport out to Ashmore, Boot and Great Detached Reefs with the later including Raine Island. These very popular exploratory trips are normally booked out a year in advance. On checking with MBDE they had just had a rare cancellation, so we just had to fill that space. It was late

November and pre-cyclone season so we immediately organised our flights to Horn a couple of days before the departure of Spoilsport so we could also tour the sites of Thursday Island (TI) – a very short ferry ride from Horn. The 1 hour 50 minute QANTAS flight from Cairns was easy and uneventful, especially since we had prebooked an extra luggage allowance to accommodate all our dive and camera gear. Researching possible sites of interest we found at TI a tour guide who showed us around including the grave sites of Japanese pearl divers, WW II gun emplacements and other interesting features. On boarding Spoilsport we were enthusiastically greeted by a crew well known to us from multiple trips to the Ribbon Reefs and Coral Sea. Other passengers, or should we say: ‘explorers’, included several of our regular dive buddies, so the excitement was mounting inside us at the prospect of sharing some dives with friends at sites that no other human had ever visited previously. After the usual orientation, safety briefings and dinner we cruised

Making friends with a whitetip reef shark

One of the many Turtles that we saw.

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DIVE LOG Australasia #410 - February 25

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