Drive four hours from Brisbane to Bundaberg and you can be on your way to a Great Barrier Reef experience like no other.
Lady Musgrave Experience is a day trip that operates out of the Coral Coast port. Passengers climb aboard a luxury catamaran, and motor two hours through the waters of the southern Great Barrier Reef to Lady Musgrave Island.
The region is probably one of the least explored on the reef, and due to the fact that it is so far off shore, it’s not easily accessible by the average boatie.
When the season is right, there’s opportunity along the way to spot migrating humpback whales.
Once it arrives at the coral cay, the vessel anchors inside the reef’s only navigable lagoon, so it’s well protected.
From there guests step onto a glass bottom boat to view the coral, fish life, and resident turtles of three varieties that hover around their favourite cleaning stations.
Once they make their way across the lagoon, the tour guides lead a walk on the island. At various times of year it’s home to thousands of breeding birds, who perch in, or burrow below the rare Pestonia Grandus trees.
Lady Musgrave is also an important turtle nesting site.
Smorgasbord lunch is followed by a ‘how to snorkel’ briefing for novices, and then everyone’s let loose on the reef to snorkel or dive. Encounters with turtles, manta rays and reef fish are the usual highlights of a swim here.
