Lady Musgrave Island

Here is an arial view of Lady Musgrave Island with the coral reef creating a lagoon.

Put on your hat, apply sunscreen, charge your camera and get ready to hit the reef!  Yes, I said that.  We went to the Great Barrier Reef!!  Lady Musgrave Island was amazing.  We heard about it in Gympie (a small town north of Brisbane) from an information centre.  Lady Musgrave cruises have access to an island, a coral reef that surrounds the island and a lagoon all packed into one and it's totally worth the price.  The cruise there took about an hour and a half.  It was thrilling and the water was acquamarine.  There was a moment when you couldn't see any land, only vast open ocean all the way around.
     When we arrived we had "tea" and then . . .

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set out in small glass-bottomed boats to explore the Island.  The fauna was beautiful although it smelled thickly of bird poop.  In the trees birds sat on big clumps of dead leaves.  The guide said they were Black Nobbies and that they made their nests out of vegetation from the ground and stuck it together with their poo. I was more grossed out than amazed because you could see the nests had dried poo about to drip off of it.

This is a Black Nobbie sitting in its "poo" nest.

We learned a bunch of stuff and walked along the beach and then got back into the boat.  When we reached our main base we had lunch and got our snorkeling gear all ready.  The service was great, they supply flippers, snorkles, goggles and crocs and the crew were nice.    

Here I am holding a sea cucumber, when you pick it up it squirts this white goo!!

     We dove in and were already surrounded with fish.  We swam out to the reef, which was exploding with colour.  In the first few minutes a turtle swam by only about a metre away, Birch followed it and Dad and I kept going.  Once I Iooked up from some coral and there was a shark swimming past Dad, too small to do any harm. At the time I thought it was a fake shark, one that looked like a shark but wasn't, so I didn't freak out. I learned later that it was a real shark, a species called a dog shark, and was kind of glad I hadn't known before because it would have ruined my whole experience. We spent the rest of the time we at the island swimming in the reef.  I saw clown fish in a giant sea anenome, angel fish, butterfly fish and other fish in all different colours.  There are some that stick out in my mind that I don't really know their names; little orange fish about as big as your pinkie finger which likes to hang around branch-shaped coral, little blue fish that flash between pearly white and sky blue and hang around in large schools, a box fish that is orange with black speckles and in a cube-like shape with curved edges (these box fish are really shy and you are lucky to see them).  There was a rainbow fish too only it didn't flash rainbow colours, it was a solid rainbow colour. 
     After hours and hours of snorkelling we went back to home base not because but because we had to.  We had another "tea" and set off for the mainland again.  The experience was amazing and so far the highlight of our Australian trip.
Yours truly,
Allie