I am yet to dive the North Wall at Myrmidon.
As part of the inaugural Megafauna Expedition, onboard the MV Sea Esta, I was deck hand on Friday, 6th September 2024.
I was holding Laura Boderke’s underwater camera, as she waited. Leaning backwards from a rail on the stern of the boat, waiting for First Mate Robert to yell the instruction, ‘Go. Go. Go’. As the Skipper cut the engine, I passed the camera across and Laura simultaneously fell backwards into the big swell – into the South Pacific Ocean, on the outside edge of Myrmidon Reef that is beyond the Great Barrier Reef proper.
Down. Down. Down they went – Laura, with her scuba buddy Sebastian Falk, and also, another and more experienced diver and photographer, Stuart Ireland, with his scuba buddy David Armstrong.
There were four of them, leaning backwards from the same platform, falling together, as one, backwards into the swell and then turning, together as one, before kicking down and disappearing from our sight – under the waves.
Before the Megafauna Expedition they had never dived together, now they were a team: our ‘North Wall’ team; tasked with bringing back information about a location that had perhaps never been scuba dived before at least not for some time.*
So much thanks to Stuart for all these photographs – so we can know something of what they saw underwater and how the North Wall at Myrmidon Reef is at this moment in time.
Stuart Ireland is a truly awesome underwater photographer and cinematographer. And as greedy as a boy in a sweet shop with a mouth full of jelly snakes he has posted so many of these magnificent photographs across at his Facebook page, ‘tis here: https://www.facebook.com/stuireland
Meanwhile I would like to organise an exhibition of the best photographs from our four days at sea – from the inaugural Megafauna Expedition to the still magnificent Great Barrier Reef. It was not all steep walls of little corals in soft colours. There are the monster corals – the single colonies of the giant golden Porites spp. in the back lagoon at Myrmidon with some more than three metres across; and of course, the clams saved by the Royal Australian Navy thirty years ago and now all grown up; and I am yet to show a photograph or write a single line about the Yongala as a dive site – where five of the nine winning photographs in the expedition’s photographic competition were taken and 122 people perished more than 100 years ago.
And there will be a documentary.
Charter of the MV Sea Esta was made possible by Sydney-based philanthropist Simon Fenwick. Special thanks to owner of Adrenalin Dive and skipper of the MV Sea Esta, Paul Crocombe.
Next time it will be Simon, Paul and me diving the North Wall.
* Sure the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) do their manta tows with someone on snorkel making a subjective judgement. Considering their record of 75-100% coral cover for this location, from their most recent survey, they have seen these corals albeit from a distance. But there are no photographs, and nothing that could be considered of historical value as a useful record of the corals at this location. Meanwhile the director of AIMS, Paul Hardisty, has just published a book about how he is going to ‘save the Great Barrier Reef’ that is he claims in terminal decline. It is a long book that is short on evidence. There is only one underwater photograph of him. He is on snorkel at John Brewer Reef and even here he confuses cyclone damage with bleaching. His disregard, and the disregard more generally by AIM, for the reality of how it is underwater and the existence of natural climate cycles, while taking so much money from the Australian tax payer needs interrogation. He, and the organisation he now leads, have become activists, not scientists. Such hubris, the notion of being able to ‘save’ the Great Barrier Reef.
Fantastic photos. Looking forward to the doco.
It is bad enough when the likes of Terry Hughes praises aerial surveys as valid method for categorizing reefs or when in 2016 he stated on Australia’s ABC Radio National: “These bleaching events are novel. When I was a PhD student 30 years ago, regional scale bleaching events were completely unheard of; they are a human invention due to global warming.” He obviously has never heard of Sir Maurice Yonge who recorded bleached coral during his 1928-29 expedition, or 19th century drawings of bleached coral as reported by hard-hat naval divers. No doubt cyclones and COTS infestations are human inventions too. Such wilful stupidity is unforgivable in someone who claims to be an ‘expert’.
The annual AIMS reports become less and less credible. Having found it difficult to find any historical evidence of global warming being so catastrophic to a simple but smart animal that has survived and thrived for over 400 million years under mostly much warmer climates, they resort to saying that it will happen ‘in the future’ and that now the ‘wrong sorts of coral’ are growing.
The 2021 and 2022 reports have the following somewhat baffling statements:
“The majority of recovery was driven by increases in the fast-growing Acropora corals, which have proliferated across many GBR reefs. However, the fast growth comes at a cost, the skeleton is less dense than other slower growing corals, making them particularly susceptible to wave damage, like that generated by strong winds and tropical cyclones. They are also highly susceptible to coral bleaching and are the preferred prey for crown-of-thorns starfish. This means that large increases in hard coral cover can quickly be negated by disturbances on reefs where Acropora predominate.”
Their understanding of climate, weather and associated biological cycles is woeful. And to think that they are paid $billions to come up with such drivel.
But the moment Jennifer and others in her team dare to question such profligacy with scientific evidence or even when specific evidence is not conclusive or yet available (science is a process of trial and error) simply providing alternative and perfectly feasible views they are met with a barrage of abuse and attempted censorship.
– ‘annual AIMS reports’ –
Money is like electricity and follows the path of least resistance.
Thanks for your interesting comment Peter Etherington-Smith.