Cairns & Port Douglas Day Three - Trying to find Nemo

Emma

Dec 27, 20203 min read

Before we knew it, it was morning again and time for another adventure. Today we were heading to the Outer Barrier Reef for a full-day tour with Quicksilver.

The Quicksilver boat is absolutely huge and usually takes up to 400 people out at a time but because of COVID they were limited to just under 100 people. This made for an absolutely terrific experience for the passengers. Everyone had tons of space to spread out on the boat for the two hour-ish boat ride out the pontoon at Agincourt Reef. We did see the crew providing sea sickness medicine to some people, so if this is a problem for you then you should be prepared as it is fairly bouncy ride. Noel and I found ourselves a spot out the front of the boat and saw both dolphins and whales on the trip out.

The Quicksilver pontoon is a huge 2 level structure set up at Agincourt Reef. Upon arrival, a delicious buffet lunch is served to you. From here, you have a choice of what to do. Most people go and get fitted for their wetsuits and snorkelling gear and jump in the water. The snorkelling is well set up and well supervised and there is an area for people who can’t swim well and/or are snorkelling for the first time but make sure that the staff are aware if you are not experienced or confident.

There is also an underwater viewing area, fish feeding demonstrations, a semi-submersible boat tour and guided snorkelling tours with a marine biologist you can sign up for. The marine biologist was an arrogant little twat who thought she was gods gift to the world and super obnoxious, so you might want to wait to sign up for this one until you get on the boat. They also normally offer underwater helmet diving and scenic helicopter tours, but both of these were temporarily cancelled due to COVID.

We went straight for the semi-submersible boat, and we were glad we did. We spent about 40 minutes puttering around the reef looking at all the coral, fish, reef sharks and even a turtle without even needing to get our hair wet! Once we were back on the pontoon, we headed to the bridge to watch the fish feeding. There were giant fish coming right up on the platform to get themselves some lunch. This happens pretty close to the snorkellers and we had a good laugh at a couple of peoples reactions to seeing the big fish so close.

We then headed down into the underwater viewing area where you can see more coral and fish. We really liked this and spent a bit of time down looking at all the different kinds of fish, we didn’t manage to find Nemo though :(

At this point of the day, we only had about an hour left on the pontoon and decided to try our luck at getting another ride on the semi-submersible boat. Due to the low numbers we were lucky enough to be able to do this again and see some more cool under sea stuff.

When it was time to load back onto the boat for the return trip to Port Douglas everyone looked tired but were happily telling each other stories of all the animals they had seen that day. Even as a non-swimmer you will have a great time on this tour.

Noel and I spent most of the return trip on the roof of the boat and it’s lucky we are chunky because it was blowing an absolute gale and we might have gotten blown into the ocean if we were smaller!! We spotted some more dolphins on the way back to Port Douglas.

We were pretty wiped out from a big day in the sun so we just headed back to chill in the park and watch the sunset before heading back to our hotel for a quiet night. We had $50 credit and a couple of free cocktails included in our package so we used this up the Oak & Vine restaurant to get some woodfired pizzas and drinks for dinner. We had a swim and then settled in for a night of movies in our room.