Green Island Day Trip: The Great Barrier Reef Without a Full Day on a Boat

There are a lot of ways to reach the Great Barrier Reef from Cairns, and most of them involve a long day on a boat. Outer-reef pontoon trips give you the best coral in the region, and they also ask for eight hours, a fair chunk of it spent travelling.

We were travelling with a toddler. So we went to Green Island instead, and it turned out to be the right call for reasons that would apply to plenty of people who are not travelling with a small child.

Our Cairns series: Day 1 — Palm Cove, Rusty’s Markets & the Esplanade Lagoon · Day 2 — the Daintree, Mossman Gorge & Port Douglas · Day 3

Planning the whole trip rather than just this day? Start with the full three-day itinerary.

What Green Island actually is 🏝️

Green Island is a coral cay — an island built by the reef itself rather than a rock with reef around it — sitting inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. It has rainforest in the middle, sand around the edge, and reef starting almost immediately offshore.

That last part is what makes it different. On most reef trips the reef is somewhere you sail to. Here it is something you walk into.

Getting there ⛴️

Boats leave from the Cairns Reef Fleet Terminal on the waterfront, and the crossing takes around 45 minutes.

Forty-five minutes is short enough to be survivable with a child who has no interest in being on a boat, and short enough that you are not writing off the morning to get there. You are on the island with most of the day still in front of you.

What our package included

Ours covered return ferry transfers, a glass-bottom boat tour and snorkelling equipment, and that combination is what we would book again.

The glass-bottom boat

This turned out to be the important part, and it is the bit we would recommend to anybody travelling with people who cannot or would rather not snorkel — small children, older relatives, non-swimmers.

It is a short trip out over the coral where you sit and look down through the hull. Everyone sees the same fish and the same coral at the same time, together. Our whole family got the reef, including the member of it who was never getting in the water.

Snorkelling off the beach

After the boat we swam. You wade in from the sand and the coral starts not far out, which means you can go in for ten minutes, come back, sit down, and go again — rather than committing to a whole session off the back of a boat.

The coral here is inshore reef and it is not the outer-reef coral you see in the documentaries. It is still the Great Barrier Reef, with reef fish and giant clams and turtles if you get lucky, and for a first taste it is more than enough.

The rainforest walk

The middle of the island has short, flat, shaded walking tracks. They take very little time and they are a good thing to have between water sessions, particularly in the middle of the day when the sun is at its worst.

Why it worked with a toddler

This is the part we would most want to pass on, because it is the question we had before we booked:

• The crossing is short. Forty-five minutes each way, not two hours.
• The paths are shaded and short. Nobody has to walk far.
• You get in the water straight off the beach. No committing to a full snorkel session, no ladders off a moving boat.
• There is somewhere to sit down between things. This is the one that actually makes or breaks a day out, and it is never on the brochure.

A pontoon trip would have given us better coral. It would also have locked us onto a boat all day with a toddler. That trade was not close.

Practical notes

Book ahead, and book it early in your trip. The reef day is the one that depends on the weather. Putting it early leaves you a spare day to move it to.

Check whether stinger suits are recommended. Marine stingers are a real consideration in the warmer months, roughly November to May, and operators will have them.

Use reef-safe sunscreen, and more of it than you think. You are on white sand and water, near the equator, with no shade in the water at all.

Take a hat, a rash vest and cash for the extras. Some things on the island are not in the package.

Do not write it off as the tourist option. It is busy, and it is busy because a coral cay 45 minutes from a regional city is a genuinely remarkable thing to be able to reach on an ordinary weekday.

That is our three days in Cairns. The whole trip in one place: the complete three-day itinerary.