Dive Great Barrier Reef

Ribbon Reefs: Challenger Bay

Challenger Bay is between Ribbon Reef #9 and #10 and boasts excellent corals that will amaze you with dazzling colours.

Extensive hard coral fields are intertwined by sandy gullies peppered with garden eels. You will often spot stingrays cruising along, with white tip reef sharks frequenting the outer edges of the reef in search of their next meal.

Starting at a mere 5m below, the top of the reef runs with a gentle slope down towards a sandy bottom at about 20m. Several bommies dot the landscape, which are interesting in itself, although the main reef wall is the focus of your dive.

On your dive you can expect to see the very photogenic clown trigger fish, barracuda, red bass, sweetlips and huge schools of giant trevally.

Challenger Bay also offers you an opportunity for very popular night dives. Over the years predatory fish have come to associate liveaboard engines and divers with an easy to find dinner. Schools of red bass featuring fish on average half a metre in length, and giant trevally at up to 1.7m each, are the prime offenders when it comes to this "crime of opportunity".

During the night dive, the moment you shine your torch on a particularly interesting subject, perhaps a small fish, it disappears in the blink of an eye as a trevally or red bass zooms in to turn the brightly lit fish into an easy dinner. The entertainment value of 'targeting' the next tidbit for a marauding trevally quickly wears off. With a little care you can still see all of the marine life without putting them in the spotlight, and consequently on the menu.

Night dives at Challenger Bay offers you plenty of other action though, and you will see hunting lion fish, large marbled moray eels, pufferfish and parrotfish in their mucus sacks. You'll also find loads of macro action as you explore the nooks and crannies of the reef, with banded cleaner shrimps and colourful nudibranchs dotting the coral. You may see some that you have not seen before which will send you scurrying to the diving boat's marine library to identify the likes of Robo's Chromodoris or Gabriel's Tambja.

Care must be taken since there are some unruly tangles of staghorn which you could easily swim into when scouring the sea bed or if you've been marvelling at something like a burrowing sea cucumber. On your ascent back to the dive boat, look out for schools of batfish, up to about 20 in number, which can keep you company on your safety stop.

Challenger Bay Reef Basics: Sloping reef
Depth: 5 - 20m
Visibility: 15 - 20m
Currents: None - gentle
Surface conditions: Generally calm
Water temperature: 25 - 30°C
Experience level: Beginner
Number of dive sites: 1
Diving season: All year round
Distance: 180km north east from Port Douglas
Access: Australia liveaboards

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