We are now a few weeks into our southern migration. We are not the only ones going south… so is the Great Barrier Reef, if you get our meaning!

Our descent south has been very much stop and start. We use whatever weather conditions we get to make southings. From the Percies where we left you two weeks ago, a short bout of easterlies brought us to the Keppel Isles, then light northerlies to the Southern Great Barrier Reef. We had not been this year, so were curious to see what it looked like after yet another round of coral bleaching and bad storms during our last summer. This visit to the Reef will be our last for quite a while, so in this post we share with you the degradation as well as the resilience we have witnessed.

Monkey Beach – Great Keppel Island

While hiding at the Keppels, we came to an old favourite: Monkey Beach at Great Keppel. It once harboured striking marine life. We used to take friends and family there to experience being surrounded by thousands of fish big and small, among colourful coral gardens. And now it is… just about dead. Although there were still a few fish and turtles, one can only wonder what they feed on. Monkey now has a mass of brown algae covering every inch of the fringing reef, courtesy of too many lethal heat waves.

Capricorn and Bunker Group

Next stop was the Capricorn & Bunker Group. We had been warned it was badly affected by the last round of bleaching. We can attest to that! We snorkeled at Fitzroy Reef and Lady Musgrave, once thriving reefs with extensive coral gardens. It was rather depressing. Repeated bleaching has this cascading effect on the reef communities, with a reduction in species richness. Everything suffers: the coral as well as the fish. We really had to look to find little bits of joy and it was hard to block out the devastation.

Fitzroy Reef

At Fitzroy Reef, there were still a few live colonies of Staghorns and Porites, evidence the reef is trying hard to survive, but the plate coral was dead – beyond the stage of being covered with algae, just grey skeletons.

Bleaching was also not limited to corals; we spotted sea anemones which had lost the colourful algae living in their tissue and had turned white. A bleached anemone and its dweller, in this case a Blackback Anemonefish, is a strangely beautiful but sad sight. This is not the first time this year that we have witnessed this. We saw it at the Swain Reefs too.

The anemone’s condition deteriorates after a bleaching event as it does not have the zooxanthellae to provide for its needs. Not only does it become totally white, but it drastically shrinks in size too. Its symbiotic dweller, the anemonefish also suffers. The white backdrop of a bleached anemone makes the anemonefish more conspicuous to predators. They are also less active, have less energy than fish in healthy anemones.

Lady Musgrave

Gluttons for punishment, we tried several spots inside and outside the Lady Musgrave Lagoon. Inside at the eastern end, we found a lot of dead coral, some damaged by storms, others by bleaching.

We managed to discover pockets where the branching species of Porites and Acropora were fighting back. You could see regrowth, but only of those two species and in very localised areas. The diversity was seriously reduced.

We also found groups of micro-atolls in the shallows. These are another type of Porites (lobata) forming huge structures that dwarf us. According to the Australian Institute of Marine Science these can be thousands of years old. The tops are typically bare, but the walls are resilient. When these die, the reef is in very deep trouble. Their walls were patchy but overall they were in reasonable condition. Around these tough mounds, other coral species were very damaged.

Chris followed a school of Goldlined Rabbitfish which led her around one of the big Porites to a snoozing Tawny Nurse Shark. It brought a smile to her face!

As is often the case, if you go on the exposed edge of reefs rather than inside a lagoon, the coral is in better nick, even if the visibility is ordinary, especially compared to the clarity of the water at the Coral Sea Atolls! This is how it looked on the outside rim of Lady Musgrave: very patchy, but the pick of a struggling reef, with a few fish patrolling the gutters. Wade even spotted a well camouflaged octopus.

If you are not a diver, spearo or underwater photographer, you cannot see the degradation. All you experience when you come to these lagoons are beautiful, protected places to anchor in, with amazing graduations of colours. Here are Fitzroy Reef and Lady Musgrave from the air.

However when you venture under the surface you are left with the feeling that the reef is past the point of no return. You keep a faint hope, but it is like watching a dear friend die a slow death.

This is a low point in our cruising this year. We expected it would be. As we keep heading south, it is time to hit the reset button and find positive experiences to focus on! Talk to you next Friday, hopefully with some whale photos to make us all smile.