Diving Cairns

Flynn Reef

Flynn Reef offers you a wide-ranging dive experience with excellent wall dives, swimthroughs, over hangs, expansive fields of hard corals and an abundance of diverse marine life.

Flynn Reef is home to several turtles and with some diver's luck you will see them all. One of them is truly enormous and must have lived the good life, and a long one too, to have reached such a size.

The colour on Flynn Reef is courtesy of the hard coral field, which features staghorn, table, plate and boulder coral heads. Splashes of vivid blue, green and yellow is interjected by many species of soft corals.

Luckily on Flynn Reef there is always something else willing to provide you with a photo opportunity. As you drop down the reef to the slightly deeper sections, you can catch sight of white tip reef sharks that are frequent sightings when diving in Cairns. At night they hang out in shallower areas resting in the small caves and overhangs of the bommies.

Before diving Tracy's at Flynn Reef the first thing to appreciate is the arc of beautiful aquamarine water that surrounds the dive boat. You will feel like you are in one of those glorious promotional images featuring a large white liveaboard sitting atop crystalline waters of varying shades of blue and illuminated by bright, sunny skies.

Below the surface is also pleasing on the eye as this site features ever-changing topography. The fine white-sand sea-bed is dotted with little bommies and coral outcrops which can be investigated as a separate shallow dive. Adjacent to this area is a larger reef section which rises from around 25 metres at its deepest to just a few metres below the surface.

Beginners will delight in "finding Nemo" on one of the bommies where a few 'true' anemones live with an entire neighbourhood of playful anemone fish. Extremely photogenic, but notoriously hard to capture, these little "Nemo's" seem to know just when you are about to press the shutter release on the camera and change their pose. There is also a good chance of spotting giant moray eels and the elusive wobbegong often seen on the indented shelf beneath a large stone coral bommie.

Elsewhere on this Cairns dive you can enjoy exploring the ruts and overhangs of the main reef. At some sections the overhang blocks out so much light it can be eerie. All around the reef are shelves, crevices and tunnels although there is nothing wide enough to be called a proper swim-through. There are however quite a lot of fish in this local Great Barrier Reef diving area including large schools of fusiliers as well as oriental sweetlips, parrotfish, goatfish and other small-to-medium reef inhabitants like surgeonfish and rabbitfish.

Topographically this is one of the more interesting sites you will visit on standard Cairns diving cruises and, since it offers plenty of scope for investigation, it should please even more experienced divers in the group. It is a great site for beginners with a lot of interesting features and some exciting marine life.

Boulders is 2 dive sites in 1. You will probably do at least 2 dives here during your Cairns liveaboard, most likely this will mean firstly drifting along a wall and secondly exploring the shallows.

The descent to both is down the same line to concrete mooring boulders which lie at a depth of less than 10 metres. Turning towards deeper water, you will find a sloping wall along which there will often be a current running. The sloping wall, as with much of the flatter section of the reef, features many hard corals including stony, mushroom and fire corals. Soft corals, hydroids and anemones are also heavily present.

Around the wall you will see several species of smaller reef fish such as butterflyfish, damsels and goldstripe wrasses. In the blue you may be able to spot larger fish and pelagics. Keep an eye out for trevally, Napoleon wrasses and whitetip reef sharks coming in from the blue.

In the shallower sections you can enjoy various sandy channels running in between sections of the reef which sometimes rise into the shallows. Here again the coral coverage is healthy as evidenced by the presence of giant clams. Perhaps it's something in the the water around Flynn Reef, because the giant clams can be enormous. To grow up to their sizes, which are up to 2m, the giant clams need to be well over 100 years old, putting things into perspective as you dive the Great Barrier Reef.

Fish-life enjoying the shallow sun-drenched waters, includes fire dart gobies, longnose filefish and fairy basslets. There are also anemones dotted around the shallows and it is worth spending a minute or two to check out their inhabitants. You might find Barrier Reef anemonefish (Amphiprion akindynos), endemic to the region, which are defined by their 2 thin white vertical bars. Another species is the orangefin anemonefish (Amphiprion chrysopterus), unmistakable with its bluey-white vertical bars and orange lateral fin against a darker body

Also worthy of note are the frequency and variation of sea cucumbers to be found creeping across the sandy floor. Eyed sea cucumber, Graeff's sea cucumber and pineapple sea cucumber are all common. This is a site that normally enjoys good light and more fish than some of the other dive spots in the Cairns scuba diving area.

Flynn Reef Basics: Sloping reef and wall dive
Depth: 5 - 28m
Visibility: 5 - 20m
Currents: Gentle
Surface conditions: Usually calm, can be choppy
Water temperature: 26 - 28°C
Experience level: Beginner - advanced
Number of dive sites: 4
Diving season: All year round
Distance: ~60 km east of Cairns
Access: Australia liveaboards

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