Having just turned a year old Queensland’s Wonder Reef lives up to its billing.
One minute I’m gazing at the skyscrapers of Surfers Paradise, the next I’m eyeballing a giant groper 30 metres under the sea. Long jewfish glide past, casting ghostly shadows against the deep blue, and schools of silvery baitfish shimmer likes shards of shattered glass. Welcome to the Gold Coast’s latest adventure tourism attraction – Wonder Reef. Billed as the world’s first ‘buoyant reef’, Wonder Reef is an artificial dive site anchored on the seabed about 2.5km offshore from Main Beach. The attraction – celebrating its first birthday this month – is a scuba diver’s playground in a destination better known for its above-water theme parks. The $5 million reef comprises nine fluted steel structures suspended in the water by giant chains anchored to the seabed by 72 tonnes of geopolymer concrete. Inspired by a rising hot-air balloon, the structures – part art, part engineering marvel – sway with the rhythm of the ocean, like a sci-fi kelp forest.
Skyscrapers behind you, a wonderland beneath.
Hitting the water
Wonder Reef is accessible to certified recreational divers. When I take the plunge, conditions are perfect, the sea resembling a giant mill pond. After a safety briefing with Gold Coast Dive Adventures (looking: good, touching scorpion fish: bad), we’re cruising out of Runaway Bay Marina, past the bottom tip of South Stradbroke Island and into open water. Wonder Reef is only a 10-minute boat ride, but first there’s a warm-up dive on the Scottish Prince shipwreck. The 64-metre sailing ship ran aground en route from Glasgow in 1887 and is today a spectacular dive site lying in 12 metres of water half a kilometre from shore.
We back-roll off the side of the boat and are immediately greeted by a large guitarfish (shovelnose ray) chilling on the seabed. The wreck is unrecognisable – patches of rusted iron smothered beneath a kaleidoscope of coral gardens. Enormous lumbering wobbegong sharks sprawl motionless across the reef, like novelty beanbags amid a profusion of sea life. I could dive here all day, but I’ve only got so much air and another reef beckons.
What were once blank suspended steel structures are now a teeming marine environment.
All the wonders
When we arrive at Wonder Reef, buoys mark the spectacle that lies beneath. We enter the water and descend the mooring line, 30 metres down, straight to the bottom. The seabed reveals concrete foundations taller than a bus and topped with a steel pyramid. Hollows have been nibbled out, like Swiss cheese, providing hidey-holes for myriad finned critters. The biggest opening is a swim-through for divers, but it’s already occupied by a googly-eyed groper who’s gone heavy on lip injectables.
Corals are already well established. Photography by Gold Coast Dive Adventures.
Air goes quickly at this depth, so we soon ascend the chain to the base of the flute (about 18 metres), accompanied by swarms of fish. The structures were installed in August 2021, opening to divers 10 months later. And already a plethora of marine life has moved in, helped by a concerted coral planting program. There are nine structures in total, clustered in groups of three, and we explore them all, peering within their steel ribbon encasing, which remind me of unwrapping a Cornetto ice-cream. Yellow and black-striped bannerfish dart in and out, feather stars’ fern-like tendrils billow in the current, and a handsome lionfish flaunts its flamboyant, but venomous, plumage. We spot the gaping gob of a moray eel poking out from the reef, while a troupe of batfish dance overhead.
When I surface, I can see the rollercoasters of Sea World. I know which theme park I prefer.
Double dives at Wonder Reef cost from $165 with Gold Coast Dive Adventures.
The writer was a guest of Destination Gold Coast