I am yet to dive the North Wall at Myrmidon.  As part of the team onboard the MV Sea Esta I was deck hand, even 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, 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 Stuart Ireland with his scuba buddy David Armstrong.

So much thanks to Stuart for all the photographs – so we can know what they saw.  He is a truly awesome underwater photographer and cinematographer.  And as greedy as a boy in a sweet shop with a mouth full of milk bottles 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 walls of little corals in soft colours.  There are the monster corals – the single colony of the Porites spp. in the back lagoon at Myrmidon 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 – where five of the nine winning photographs 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 I diving the North Wall.