How Deep Is the Ocean

Exploring the profound depths and the shallows in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, you can even learn something about scuba diving.

By Michael Winter
Photos by Matt Hobbs

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A Chinese man is taking a photo of the sea. He’s in a black suit, his black dress shoes left on the sand. Near him, a woman is directing a man who is bending his knees in the water. The man is holding a vinyl LP in each hand, crouching to play the records on the crest of a wave. He’s wearing big earphones, a DJ, doing a promo.

I’ve come here to the east coast of Australia to scuba dive. When my grandfather died, he left me a thousand dollars. My mother said, Do frivolous things with it. So I bought an electric guitar and an amp. I was renting a house in St. John’s from a woman who taught scuba diving. And she scolded me. Every Newfoundlander, she said, should see the bottom of the ocean.

The woman was giving lessons at a hotel not far from the house. There were men in the class who couldn’t swim. They were fishermen trying to get a sea urchin licence. They had to be rescued from the pool and sent home.

It was in that pool on a hill 100 metres above sea level that I submerged and breathed underwater for the first time. A large awareness of the life force slips into your skin when you breathe, and I thought of my grandfather and how happy he’d be that his money was making me feel this. It reminded me of dreams where I’ve figured out how to turn my neck and sift water through my teeth to extract the oxygen.

On my way to the Great Barrier Reef, I stopped at Cape Byron. I stopped because it is the most easterly point of land in Australia. While living in Newfoundland, I’ve seen how many people drive out to Canada’s most easterly point, Cape Spear. What an odd goal, and yet I remember once travelling to the very centre of Bulgaria to witness a geological pole stuck in the ground in a fenced-in square. The very centre of a country.

I ate fish and chips on Byron Beach and lay on the sand at six o’clock. Dark. An hour before, 23 surfers bent their boards around a large tangle of foam and rock. I had walked along this beach to Cape Byron and taken a picture of myself on the cliffs. If you rubbed away the surfers, this landscape was exactly like Newfoundland. Perhaps all the extremes are the same. Perhaps when you take your shoes off outdoors, you are being outrageous.

Pods of bottle-nosed dolphins below. Dolphins turning to swim into the waves, to leap through them. A black turkey plunged out of the woods, his head red and throat yellow. He was so strange that I aimed my camera at him. Then, for the rest of the walk, I couldn’t move without kicking a turkey.

A woman with hands on her hips talked to two men. She was tall. But she was pushing against her hips, as though trying to stretch herself longer.

Then the rain. Suddenly, there were umbrellas and a woman in plastic knee-high red boots. On the horizon, a line of humpbacks on their way north, on their way to Canada, to mate and calve.

I, too, worked my way north to Cairns, which is where you want to go if you’re interested in the Great Barrier Reef.

I check into a youth hostel in a part of Cairns that reminds me of West Hastings. I secure the only private room at the hostel. When I was 20, I stayed in youth hostels in Greece. There was usually one private room and a 40-year-old man in that room. An eccentric. Now I am that man.

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