FathomOz

We went 250 miles offshore in this tiny fishing boat.   A great adventure with a pioneer of The Great Barrier Reef, Captain Wally Muller- later of Coralita charter boat notoriety. Coralita was Australia’s first scuba dive boat on the GBR, launched in 1969.

Wally Muller built Coralita which was launched in 1969. Originally it was intended as a cruise boat working the islands and reefs offshore on the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef.   The vessel, while being an excellent open sea craft was prone to ‘rocking wildly’ at anchor. Tourists were often seasick.  Wally Muller then turned to fishing and  diving charters.  Through his friendship with Ron Taylor and John Harding (then the founding editor of FATHOM) he was able to attract local and overseas scuba divers, especially from USA.  Hollywood producers seeking shark scenes obtained these in The Coral Sea.  Wally returned to Saumarez Reef several  times and found a magnificent bommie in 100 feet of water that rose to 30 feet under the surface.  Modestly named “Wal’s Bommie” it was for a short time one of the best scuba dive locations known.  Today the location would be ‘lost’. Although Wally Muller chartered and named many reefs in The Swain Reefs, only one retains one of his original names “Riversong Cay”.

Underwater models of today might enjoy researching the films of Esther Williams.  Hollywood movies based around synchronized pool swimming were big in the 1950′s and no expense was spared in their production.  Esther was the queen of the era.

I spotted this poster at a town west of Townsville, Queensland called Ravenswood.   It was 1978 so the poster is unlikely to be still on display.

Gina Taylor (pictured) and I did presented our underwater film show in the local hall that night, just for fun.   The roll-up was surprisingly good for a ‘ghost town’, formerly a gold mining boom town.

A pair of hotels remained open, otherwise it’s worth a visit to see the main street with old shops with wooden footpaths, just like a Hollywood western movie.

After years of drought there was rain all along the east coast of Australia.  The sharks that were thought to be on the brink of extinction suddenly came back by the hundred.  The link between rainfall and sea life has not been studied, to my knowledge, at least not with shark populations.

Try counting the Grey nurse in this picture.  I think there could be 21.

Comment via Facebook:

“I believe that the Grey nurse is not a threatened shark, there are still many congregations of the sharks that the so called know alls don’t know about, certainly in the area where I live.  (North coast of New South Wales).

I have even seen a 7ft 6″ one that was caught in the lower section of the Clarence River and one that was caught in a trawler’s net just north of Yamba NSW on sand.

There are many places along the NSW coast that have not been dived on and would most certainly support the Grey Nurse shark. This is my beleif and I stand to be correct.  I have swam and dived in the ocean for the last 40 years.  Geoff ‘Boots’ Towner 2 July 2010

Just off the beach there is a reef that is sometimes exposed, other times covered in sand.  A couple of pictures from 1981.

A few minutes before this picture was taken at a remote spot on Fraser Island, I thought this wild Australian dog was going to give me trouble.  After it was able to smell my scent it settled down and was becoming ‘playful’ when this picture was recorded.

A few months later a young child was killed by a dingo at this same location.  This led to a culling and many poor dogs were killed by park rangers under government  orders.

The northern Fraser Island dingo’s are a pure strain obviously isolated from the mainland breed.  This good-looking dog is a fine example.

Solitary Island has become a popular scuba location since the formation of the Solitary Islands Marine Park.  The lighthouse went auto during the late 1970′s.

At the lighthouse Solitary Island are the southernmost coral formations on the Australian east coast.

A surf expert finds it hard to believe there were ever rocks at Rainbow Bay in 1968.

Bob Grounds and I almost ran our 15 ft boat onto them when filming this rider.

It gave us a fright.   So much so only one slow motion film sequence was made.

(The original is much sharper than what appears here).

click picture to enlarge it

Part of an enormous colony of starfish, Otter Reef, near Townsville, July 1967

White blotches on plate coral are curious and alarming.   This picture is from the last roll of underwater film exposed by this late famous charter boat skipper and owner of Coralita.   It was discovered in his motor drive Nikon camera still in it’s marine housing.