SS Yongala

Again, this has been called ‘the best dive in the world’ and ‘the best wreck in the world’, but it’s hard to compare dive or wreck sites. This is a steamer trading ship which was caught in a cyclone off Cape Bowling Green, just off Townsville on Australia’s east coast, in 1911—which is why some guides will tell you it's Australia’s Titanic. It sunk onto the sand, which is probably why it’s so well preserved and now a garden of colourful coral. It also sunk in an upright position, which makes it easy to get around, but you’re not allowed to go inside, it’s a finable offence and people have been fined. There’s plenty to see on the outside—batfish in schools that move like magic carpets across the wrecks surface, beautiful, flying manta rays and eagle rays, jacks, wrasse, barracuda, giant groupers, trevally, as well as turtles, octopuses, bull sharks, tiger sharks and sea snakes.

This is part of the Great Barrier Reef so this amount of life and colour is to be expected, but it’s still astonishing to see how nature reclaims wrecks. It’s like Geoffrey Rush’s character’s face from the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ films, corals growing onto other corals or onto living, moving creatures and parts of the wreck. In water about 15 m deep at its shallowest point, the wreck is about 100 m long. Currents can be unpredictable and so can visibility, but people who have done a lot of wreck diving rave about this wreck despite that.