Cruising the Great Barrier Reef?

[Riversedge]

I’m trying to convince my husband to do the Legendary voyage on the Noordam, round trip Singapore on Jan 4.   He was all for it until he counted 15 sea days.  Some of them are cruising the Great Barrier Reef.  What can you see from the ship?  Anything?  The voyage has two days cruising the Great Barrier Reef, one day cruising the Ribbon Reef, one cruising the far north region and and another cruising the The Torres Strait.   I’d love to hear from someone who is familiar with this.  Thanks!

[CruiserBruce]

There are pretty tightly defined channels. Yes, you will see some islands and reefs, but not really close.

[OlsSalt]

This is definitely  not a glass bottom boat cruise across the Great Barrier Reef. You will need to take snorkeling shore excursions at various port stops to see anything under water. Wearing "stinger suits".  Or arrange for a fly over tour.

[dockman]

Biggest surprise to me years ago when i first saw at least part of the great barrier reef is that it is not right along the shore but "out to sea"....for some reason i thought it would be much closer to shore and maybe it is in some areas.  As for seeing much of anything from a cruise ship deck I think, but not 100% sure, that is not likely at all.

 

I did a dive boat tour for several days and even from that small draft boat that could sit right on top of the reef yes you could look straight down in some spots but no way could a cruise ship get that close without danger.  But if you jumped in the water with a mask you could in some places see all the way to the bottom to include lots of reef sharks just lying around relaxing as well as zillions of all kinds of fish doing their thing.

[ColonyGirl2]

We had that cruise booked and cancelled when I decided that the "cruising" days were really just more sea days.  Instead are we are taking the following 29 day Far East cruise, plus the 14 day Japan/Taiwan after that.   Strange that the 29 day Far East was $2K pp cheaper than the Coral Triangle with all its sea days. We are happy with the change we made, and this thread validates it.

 

I did visit the GBR on a snorkel trip a long time ago and we did see some whales breaching on the boat trip, but that was in August so I don't know if the whales are there in January.

[Pushka]

We sailed through the GBR on QM2 which is a massive ship and I really enjoyed it. We came close to shore where possible and could watch local people fishing from their canoes, a few on speedboats kept pace with us, all the various inlets and islands, and the water was this fabulous colour of blue. It was warm and languid. It certainly wasn't the ocean 'sea day' experience. 

[X-elite]

Cruising the Great Barrier Reef was not exciting last week. The Daily had a schedule, but if you napped all afternoon you wouldn't have missed much...

[ColonyGirl2]

On 2/7/2024 at 1:57 AM, dockman said:

Biggest surprise to me years ago when i first saw at least part of the great barrier reef is that it is not right along the shore but "out to sea".

 

When I did my snorkel trip out of Port Douglas,  it took over an hour to get out to the reef on a fair sized boat.  The water was beautiful but you couldn't see any land nearby.