Tale of two reefs

By Ty Sawyer

The world’s introduction to the Great Barrier Reef came with a timber-shredding crunch. Captain Cook, on his epic voyage of discovery, had found a tiny corner of a vast kingdom built by the mighty and humble polyp, and it had minced the soft belly of his great ship, the Endeavor. The year was 1770. Stretching canvas across the great rent and limping to shore for repairs saved the day.

After the repairs were completed, Cook spent a few weeks sailing north in a heightened state of equal parts fear and awe, watching the sea on the horizon ripple with enormous, and seemingly endless, fields of light-dappled corals waiting just below the surface.

Right now I’m viewing the barrier reef from a decidedly safer vantage: hanging from the open door of an Aviation Dreams helicopter in the Whitsunday Islands. Spread across the horizon below me, long striations of the Hook and Hardy Reefs intermingle with smaller dots of coral, all sovereign empires built by the mad whims and rhythms of light, water and time. Despite the unruly design, I see hundreds of lovely cities rising from the seafloor, full of the complexities of urban life, of living and dying, of color and motion, of daily toil.

I wish I could explore each and every coral turret, bommie and canyon that unfolds before me. The sight calls to my mind an Australian aboriginal belief called the Dreaming. It’s a place of beginnings and endings, all created in the “time before time.” The Great Barrier Dreaming, as I imagine it, began with the first polyp, and its stories, secrets and progeny have since spread 1,200 miles along the coast, from the Eastern Fields in the north to Heron Island in the south. In between are more than 2,800 reefs and 940 islands, 90 percent of which remain unexplored.

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In the course of several trips to Australia, I’ve personally managed to set eyes on all of about 20 of these sites. Even large measures of hyperbole can’t encompass this massive life form. I am viewing, all at once, the beginnings and the future of one of the most complex systems of life on the globe. I try to imagine where that first polyp emerged on the seafloor, where the Dreaming began. But like other places built as much on myth as on reality, most of what I see spread before me exists, grows, lives and dies incognito, never feeling the gaze of man.

And it will no longer feel my gaze on this day.

UNDERSTATEMENTS

“There’s a bit of rain headed our way, mate,” says the pilot, beckoning me to settle back into my seat.

Ty Sawyer / Sport Diver

The Australians, it should be noted, have a keen sense of understatement. So when the pilot tells me there’s “a bit of rain headed our way, mate,” my stomach tightens in anticipation of the great deluge. Sure enough, when I turn my head I see a dark, imposing shadow and an impenetrable curtain of rain racing across the water’s surface. I watch as the famous heart-shaped reef and the gold and blue coral fields are overrun by this gloomy cloak and their luster turned quickly to an iron gray. We race the front, buffeted by the winds. By the time we touch down on Hamilton Island in the usually idyllic Whitsundays, where I’d stopped on my way north to Cairns, the winter dry season has turned decidedly wet.

“Looks like you might have a bit of weather for the next few days. Never seen it like this, at least not this time of year, mate.” He pauses, measuring my response to his words. My initial thought is that this is the first of 15 days I have in Oz, as Australia has become popularly known.

“No worries, though,” the pilot assures me as he crumples the printout of the weather forecast he holds in his hand. “You’ll be 300 kilometers from here soon enough, anyway. Well … cheers, then.”

Two understatements in a row, I think. Oh, no.

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