Cairns to Lizard Island: the northern Reef

Board at the Cairns marina after a morning flight and head straight north. The Low Isles are a coral cay with a lighthouse and a lagoon an hour off Port Douglas: the first snorkel, turtles in the seagrass, and a sunset the day boats never stay for.

• Airport to the Reef in an afternoon
• Turtles in the Low Isles lagoon
• The first sunset on the Reef

Into Port Douglas for the morning: Four Mile Beach, the Sunday market if the day falls right, and a long lunch at one of the tables on Macrossan Street that we book for you. The afternoon is a choice between the Daintree rainforest by car and the pool deck.

• Four Mile Beach
• Lunch on Macrossan Street, booked by us
• The Daintree, or the sun deck

Out to the edge of the continental shelf. The Agincourt reefs are the ribbon of coral where the Reef meets the deep, and the visibility is the best on the coast: diving and snorkelling off the back of the boat all afternoon, and the night at anchor behind the reef with nothing but the Coral Sea beyond it.

• Diving the shelf edge
• The clearest water on the coast
• A night behind the outer reef

North along the Ribbon Reefs, ten long reefs in a line with a few boats a season between them. Steve's Bommie is the famous pinnacle, a tower of coral rising from thirty metres with everything on the Reef living on it. Two dives, or the snorkel over the top for the rest of the group.

• Steve's Bommie
• The Ribbon Reef walls
• Almost no other boats

Cod Hole at the top of Ribbon Reef Ten, where the potato cod have met divers for forty years and come to the mask. Giant clams, white-tip reef sharks, and in June and July the dwarf minke whales that visit nowhere else on earth so reliably. Lizard Island is on the horizon by evening.

• Potato cod at Cod Hole
• Dwarf minke whales, June and July
• Lizard Island on the horizon

Into Watson's Bay. The Clam Gardens are a snorkel off the beach, the Blue Lagoon on the other side of the island is the swim, and the walk up to Cook's Look, where Cook climbed to find a way out through the reef in 1770, is the view. Dinner at the resort if the group wants a night off the boat; it is the one table on the island and we hold it.

• The Clam Gardens off the beach
• Cook's Look at sunrise or sunset
• Dinner at the resort, booked by us

The Blue Lagoon by tender for the morning, a beach picnic on one of the twenty-four beaches with nobody on it, the research station if anyone is curious, and the last dinner on board with the island black against the stars.

• The Blue Lagoon
• A picnic on an empty beach
• The last dinner under the stars

A last swim, then the tender to the strip and the one-hour flight to Cairns for your connection. The yacht stays north or begins her run back down the Reef.

• A last swim
• Lizard Island to Cairns in an hour