Lady Elliot Island

The tide sets the timetable. Boats are launched off the beach and have to cross the reef flat to get out, so dive times move forward or back each day with the water rather than sitting at a fixed hour. Rides are short, most sites being a few minutes off the cay, and the shop runs two-dive mornings with an afternoon dive and night dives added when conditions suit. Shore entries go in from the sheltered western side, close enough that walking in, diving and getting back takes under an hour.

The cay is a low sand island sitting on a reef platform, ringed by a lagoon and a reef flat that dries out at low tide. The western side shelves into a slope of coral bommies standing on clean sand, and that is where most diving happens; the eastern side is open to the prevailing southeasterly and only goes on calm days. Depths top out in the mid-twenties, so no-decompression time is rarely the constraint, and sites differ by exposure and by which bommies hold cleaning stations.

The mantas shape how the diving is run. At the cleaning stations divers settle onto the sand a little back from the coral and stay low while the rays circle in to be worked over by cleaner wrasse; swimming at them empties the site, so guides brief the etiquette hard. Numbers build through the cooler middle of the year, roughly May to August, and the peak stretch runs on into September. Photographers can shoot the same station for a week and still log new individuals, since each animal is identifiable by its belly markings.

It suits new divers, families and photographers, and snorkellers see a fair share of what divers see. There is one small resort and no town, running largely on solar, with fresh water desalinated on site and guests asked to go easy on it. Seabirds nest across the cay and are loud from first light. What it does not offer is depth, or any choice of operator, so divers chasing variety tend to run out of new ground in a few days.