From Jennifer Marohasy

By jennifer

Diving the North Wall, Myrmidon Reef, Part 4. Inaugural Megafauna Expedition, September 2024 

September 17, 2024 By jennifer 1 Comment

Share

Share

Share

I am yet to dive the North Wall at Myrmidon.  As part of the team 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 at the back 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 at the stern of the boat, 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.*

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 for 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 even for that moment in time.  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 in terminal decline.   It is a long book, yet there is only one underwater photograph of him.  He is on snorkel at John Brewer Reef and even here he confused 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.   It is a disgrace.