This is miraculous. Whatever else happens today, I have got my money’s worth. What a beautiful, wonderful, brilliant creature. What a—
Phwoooosshhh!
A healthy dose of Tweed River and dolphin snot hits me square in the face.
Little sod!
I jerk my head backwards, connecting with the lens of Harry’s camera. The old man stumbles back, caught by Jim before he has a chance to fall to the deck and fracture a hip.
Nursing the back of my head with one hand, I wipe dolphin booger from my eyes and look back down at my waterborne assailant, who nods his head at me, rolls onto one side, waves a cheeky flipper that must be the equivalent of the middle finger, and sinks back beneath the waves to join his friends.
“See?” Daffo says. “A right bloody nuisance.”
I’ve finished cleaning myself up by the time the boat sets off from the docks. Jamie, who knows which side his bread is buttered, chooses not to comment. Jim and his Scots pal can’t look me in the face without grinning. Harry and his wife are studying his camera lens for signs of damage, so I’m spared their attention for the time being.
“Zat was unfortunate,” the French woman says and introduces herself as Sandrine. “He seemed like such a nice animal before zat ’appened.”
“That’s the problem with the smart ones,” Jamie says sagely. “The more clever they are, the more likely they are to take the piss out of you.”
“Yes indeed,” she agrees. “An octopus hit my ’usband in the penis last month off ze coast of Cannes.”
This is greeted with stony silence. Frenchy realises she may have provided too much information and makes her apologies to go to the restroom.
“Good grief, that’s a weird thing to happen to someone,” I say to Jamie. “I wonder what he did to the octopus to make it that angry.”
“The dude’s French, do you need anything else?”
“That’s a bit unfair. It must have hurt. I wonder what he did about it.”
“Threw his hands up and surrendered, I would imagine. The French tend to do that when confronted with physical violence. The octopus has probably been made president by now.”
The boat chugs up the river at a fairly slow pace, giving Wilko and Tommo a chance to take us all through the safety briefing. They explain how to use the snorkels, when to put on and take off our life jackets, and demonstrate the universally approved sign for being in distress.
“You throw your hands around over your head and scream
“Help, I’m fucking drowning!”
says Wilko to a chorus of slightly nervous laughter.
The briefing successfully concluded, Daffo announces over the mic that he’s going to speed up the boat, and we’re suddenly off like a rocket, spearing towards the river’s entrance with the breeze and salty spray providing much-needed relief from the baking heat.
“This thing’s a lot faster than it looks!” Harry exclaims with exuberance.
He’s right. We’re clipping along at a speed I’m unaccustomed to in a boat. I was quite happy with the leisurely pace we were setting previously, but there are turtles to see and a limited time to do it in. I grip the seat behind me and try to grin and bear it.
Grinning and bearing changes to clenching and suffering as we hit the Tweed’s mouth. Our life jackets go on as a precaution at this point, given that the river has suddenly gone from flat as a pancake to a seething cauldron of crashing waves and rushing whitecaps.
“This is what it’s like when the river hits the sea!” Wilko shouts at all of us by way of explanation. “Don’t worry. We’ll be out beyond it in a few minutes.”
This is just as well. I’ve always been pretty good on boats, but this roller coaster is bad enough for my breakfast to be considering a glorious reentry to the world. Wilko is as good as his word, though, and very soon we’re out into the ocean proper and chugging along on waves that are half the size and much more manageable.
“There’s the island where the reef is,” Jamie points out. “The turtles should be right there.”
I spy the tiny grass-covered rock a mile distant and fix my gaze on it. This helps settle my stomach, so much so that I’m quite happy to munch on one of the cinnamon doughnuts Spud has produced from the boat’s galley.
Daffo decreases speed back to a gentle chug when we’re about a hundred yards off the island’s rocky edge and swings her round so she’s broadside.
“Okay ladies and gents, this is our mooring point for today,” he says over the mic. “If you’d like to climb into your wet suits and get your snorkelling gear, we’ll jump in the water and see if we can spot some turtles.”
I don’t need to be told twice. I have the image of a turtle being fed firmly in my mind. I can’t wait to jump in the crystal clear water and float around the gorgeous multicoloured reef as promised by Diving Gold’s website. I’m the first to be ready and am standing at the rear of the boat with my flippers on before poor old Harry has had a chance to trap his scrotum in his zipper again.
“Right then, you ready?” Wilko says from my side.
“Yes!” I cry excitedly.
“In you go, then.”
I take a deep breath, hold the snorkel mask as I have been told, and take a step out into the unknown…
If you look at the Gold Coast on a map, you’ll note it’s far nearer to the equator than Antarctica. Nobody’s told the sea that though. It’s bloody cold. So cold that I’m very glad I elected to have a nice thick wet suit on over my swimmers. I come up for air spluttering, with my eyes goggling in the snorkelling mask. Jamie is still standing on the side of the boat. He gives me a thumbs-up and jumps in. I get a face full of salty seawater when his head pops back out right next to me.
“Cold!” he wails.
“Yes, I’d noticed!”
Jim and the other Scottish lad are next to follow. I never did find out his name, so I’ll just have to call him Drunky.
Neither seem too bothered by the frigid water. But then they are Scottish and there could be icebergs floating by and they’d probably be fine.
Sandrine and her octopus-wrestling husband are next. He elects to dive in headfirst, the idiot. I think he’s trying to look macho, but all he succeeds in doing is nearly ripping his nose off when the mask hits the water.
Harry and Myra take an age to climb in, but then we really can’t blame them for that. Rather than jumping in, both clamber down a steel ladder that drops into the water. This is just as well as the shock would probably have exploded Harry’s pacemaker the second he broke the surface. In actual fact Harry seems to be the happiest one out of the lot of us once we’re all bobbing around a few feet away from the boat.
“Woo!” he exclaims. “That’ll get your heart pumping!”
He’s not wrong. Mine is trip-hammering away right now. This is partly because I’m doing more exercise than I have done in months in cold Pacific seawater, and partly because my excitement level is reaching a crescendo. I am mere moments away from glorious reef-turtle-feeding fun.
Last into the Australian ocean are Wilko and Tommo, our guides on this trip.
“Okay guys, listen up,” Wilko says. “We’re both going to snorkel towards the best areas of the reef and start pointing things out to you. Just follow either me or Tommo. You’re welcome to swim between us, but please don’t go beyond where we are. If you get into any trouble, give us a shout.”
Which is fair enough unless you’re already twenty feet under and sinking—but I shake off that disturbing train of thought and take off after Wilko, who I’ve decided to follow as he has the nicer bottom of the two. Jamie in turn follows me. I’d like to think that’s because he reckons I have the nicest bottom as well. Sandrine’s athletic French behind looks like it could give me a run for my money, but I still think I’d just about edge it in the perkiness stakes.
The sea here is relatively calm, which is good as it means you can quite happily skim along on the surface of the water towards your intended destination using your flippers to propel you along. It also means that when I come to use the snorkel, I can do so without worrying about waves crashing over my head and sending a dump of cold, salty water down the breathing tube.
I reach Wilko’s bottom—and by extension the rest of him—where it has now positioned itself a good fifty yards from the boat.
“Right, this is one of the best parts of the reef to see the turtles,” he says to us. “Just remember to breathe nice and calmly while you’re snorkelling, and watch out for one another. I’ll shout if I see anything picture worthy. Have fun!”
Oh, I intend to, Wilko. Don’t you fret.
I put the snorkel into my mouth, take a deep breath, and plunge my head under the surface.
Now, I am well aware that holiday brochures don’t necessarily tell you the whole truth when it comes to the trips and locations on offer. I’m well versed in the concept of Photoshopping and always take those pictures I see in the glossy pages of travel brochures with a pinch of salt. The sky is never really that bright cobalt blue, and the sand is rarely that perfect shade of white. Clouds are banished by the delete tool, as are any surly-looking locals who happen to walk through the frame when the photographer is taking the snap.
Brochures of that nature are designed to sell you a dream and therefore are likely to play fast and loose with the truth every now and again to tempt you in. I accept this. And I accept that the website for Diving Gold would probably use some of the same tactics to draw people in to its turtle-watching reef trips.
I say all this to reassure you that I’m not expecting to lower my head into the water and see a fantasy land of colourful coral reef that looks
exactly
like the pictures I’d been gazing at the night before. I’m not that stupid. I am, however, expecting to lower my head into the water and see something
similar
to what the images on the website had promised me.
What I’m not expecting are brown pointy things—and a lot of them. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of different brown pointy things down there. Some are thin and pointy, others are quite fat. Some are quite stubby, while others are long tendrils feeling their way out from the seabed.
There is a lot of variety in the shapes and sizes on offer, but—and I can’t stress this enough—they are all fucking brown. Light brown, dark brown, mottled brown, and streaky brown. Browns of every hue. Browns of every tone. Fifty shades of brown, in fact.
It’s just as well the sea around me is dark green, otherwise I’d feel like I was swimming around in a giant toilet bowl. This coral system is supposed to be at the end of the Great Barrier Reef. If so, it’s definitely at the arse end, judging by the decor. I can’t help but feel disappointed by this development.
Jamie doesn’t seem too bothered, though. He’s happily snapping away with the underwater camera, and we’ll no doubt have a fun-filled evening showing Poppy pictures of a huge variety of blurry, brown pointy things.
Still, it’s not really the reef we came here to see anyway, is it? Nope, the turtles are our main goal this morning, and surely they will make up for the monotone nature of their habitat, won’t they?
It’s just a question of finding some…
Wikipedia states that green turtles “spend most of their time in shallow coastal waters with lush sea grass beds. Adults frequent inshore bays, lagoons, and shoals with lush sea grass meadows.”
What it completely fails to tell you is that they have the ability to turn themselves completely fucking
invisible
. I can only assume this is the case given the next twenty-five minutes of my life in an increasingly frantic underwater search off the coast of Queensland.
To begin with, I just bob around more or less on the spot, confident that sooner or later I’ll spy a turtle and can go in for a closer look. After a few minutes it becomes apparent that this tactic is a very bad one to employ as no turtles cross my field of vision even once. I do see one rather fat, bored-looking fish swimming around on the seabed, but this isn’t quite the same thing. In fact, it’s a miracle I can even pick it out among the coral forests as the fucker is, of course, a healthy shade of brown.
It dawns on me that I should be surveying a larger area, thus increasing my chances of turtle success, so I start to flipper my way between where Wilko and Tommo are bobbing about on the surface of the water.
This takes up the next fifteen minutes, during which I spy the following:
A brown, pointy rock covered in seaweed.
The fat, bored fish again.
Jamie.
A brown, flat rock covered in brown coral.
Sandrine’s bottom, which looks even more annoyingly pert underwater.
The fat, bored fish’s mate, who is slightly smaller but looks equally fed up with its lot.
Jamie.
The underside of the boat.
The first fat, bored fish again, who is now starting to think I’m up to something.
Wilko’s bottom, which is by far and away the best thing I’ve seen so far.
A brown coral that looks like a beach ball covered in dog fur.
Jamie.
A large crab negotiating its way through a thick patch of seaweed.
My friend the fat, bored fish, who is now convinced I’m stalking it and is about to jump on the phone to alert the nearest authorities.
What I don’t see hide nor hair of is a turtle.
By now my legs are tired, the skin on my fingers is pruning magnificently, and I dread to think how much product I’m going to have to use in the shower to counteract the damage this cold, salty water is doing to my hair. I’m almost on the verge of tears. All I wanted was to pet the head of a wizened-looking green turtle in its natural habitat, is that too much to ask?
Jamie surfaces next to me. “Have you seen a turtle? I thought I did over there, but it turned out to be a coral that looked like a furry beach ball. I took a picture of it anyway.”
“No. No turtles at all.”
“Elusive, aren’t they?”
“Shoes that fit my toes properly are elusive, Jamie. What these buggers are is
nonexistent
. I want my money back!” I shout and slap the water with one frustrated hand.