Second Reef, Lady Elliot Island

It doesn’t matter how many times you dive the aptly named Second Reef, you’ll see something new and different each time. It has everything from a nursery of the smallest little fish to swirling packs of trevally – and everything in between. Here is just a sample of what we saw on a single dive.

A million (OK I didn’t count them individually) juveniles swirling around in the shelter of a bommie.

A White spotted guitar fish – identifiable by the large triangular dorsal fin.

And this is how close he let us get before he decided we were ‘too close’.

In the same spot we saw this Cow tail ray half covered in sand.

Clearly a Cow tail ray hides under a sandy blanket for a reason – it’s his ‘do not disturb’ sign.

OK – guilty.  Again we got too close and she bolts.

It’s often too easy to forget to look up. If you remember to, you might see a passing manta, or a swallow-diving turtle.

This guy did the most gracefully plummet from surface to coral.

Amazing how a turtle with four fins can land on staghorn without so much as chipping a single horn, whereas a diver with only two fins, can cause a decade’s worth of damage by a single accidental clip.

Though in most cases, even the turtles have respect for the coral and find somewhere else to snooze.

Amongst the various fishlife we watched this Batfish being cleaned

I spotted this Two Bar Soapfish – a first for me – that was my ‘not seen that one before’ point of the dive.

And then close to the end of the dive, the focus usually drops to a single square metre of coral where the more you look, the more appears, like this pretty little Dot and dash butterflyfish

Followed by a Blacksaddle toby

And as the Blacksaddle toby departs a spotted hawkfish pops up for a look

And finally, as promised, from the smallest to the largest, a swirling pack of Brassy trevally glides by.