I wonder how long these corals survive?  My guess is this specimen is very very old. Adam Cropp is the snorkel diver. (This is the same gorgonian currently shown as our background image).

 

One of two anchors in the surf at Great Detached Reef.  Probably having belonged to Fatima. Fatima. Ship, 441 tons. Built 1849. Captain Hardie. Wrecked  on Great Detached Reef, GBR, 1854. Crew rescued by the Dutch ship Bato who picked up ten men who had made it to Raine Island which is visible in the [...]

Alby Ziebell fitted an excellent diving platform to the boat while he was owner. Coralita was renamed Alita then sold.  The new owner renamed her yet again, to Bell Cay.  The newspaper website obtained much of of the news from our original site http://fathomoz.com Captain Wally Muller of Coralita was a professional fisherman who worked [...]

Ben Cropp and I found this dugong feeding on seagrass and followed it for some time.  This was the best picture, taken by myself using color negative film. (Fathom is a registered trade mark in Australia).

Offshore from Cooktown, on the outer edge on one of the 1200  Great Barrier Reefs In early 1942, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), experiencing Japanese air raids on towns in northern Australia, found itself unable to obtain British-designed interceptors or sufficient numbers of P-40s. US Fifth Air Force squadrons in Australia were already receiving [...]

Kathy Troutt’s interview was published in Fathom No.1  (below) A few years before she had made a deep scuba dive, supervised by Wally Reynolds, a former RAN navy diver and at the time, holder of the Australian depth record on compressed air. Kathy became a photographic model, fashion model, actor in documentaries, TV series and [...]