On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 23:19:17 +1000, Peter Webb wrote:

Yeah, these are all quite good. Haven't seen most of these since I was a
kid. Living here, you tend to fly between places and miss the bits in
between - all the places you mentioned are "in between places" - not
somewhere you would specially go to, but certainly places worth seeing if
you are driving through.

Which is the exact opposite of what you do when you're backpacking. You
stop at most of them along the way.

there wouldn't be that many Australians who have done all of them. But then
again, you have to question the mindset of somebody who talks down Sydney
and talks up Ballarat. (As in "Don't bother visiting London. For a really
good time, go straight to Sheffield").

I didn't say don't visit Sydney. I've just been there a couple of times before,
and done most of the obvious attractions.

The reef is great there. If the viz was poor, that was just the weather; it
can range from 10 feet to 150 feet depending on where and when. Dead
staghorn coral on fringing reefs may be due to run-off; if it was on the
outer reef it was almost certainly localised storm damage. I agree that

You and I have a different definition of "great" then. When was the last
time you went there? I dived in 1998 and the reefs were fine. I then did a
trip last year that went north to the Ribbon Reefs and the Cod Hole. The
northern reefs were fine again, but as soon as you got as far south as
Port Douglas, the viz dropped and there was a lot of dead staghorn. And
these were some of the same places that I'd dived 4 years before.

Further south out of Airlie, the coral was in better shape.

But the really good diving is at places like Holmes Reef or Osprey, which
are much further out.

Jason

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