Of course, if your fantasy is to fly out to the Great Barrier Reef by sea plane (and then snorkel for a coupla hours), you've come to the right place. So, we're pretty stoked right now!! Yes, we're flying in the same plane that we saw bopping around the islands last week. Which is kinda cool.
It took about 25 minutes from Hayman Island flying at a top speed of 90 knots (and never higher than 1,000 feet... in fact most of these pictures of the reef are from about 200-300 feet). The plane seated six - there was a couple from Winnipeg (he was Dean of the law school at the U of Manitoba!) and of course, because we wouldn't have it any other way, there was a gay couple from Russia. Nice group. Eclectic. Our Captain was
Paddy Martin. After he put us down in the Reef, he single-handedly moored us to the glass-bottom pontoon boat. Then he single-handedly piloted the pontoon boat to our snorkeling spot. Then he single-handedly gave us an overview of the reef. One of many croc hunter types we met down here, but a classic, that Captain Paddy.
And yes, despite 1,000 people telling us we'd never have to worry about seeing a shark, Wendy and I came face to face with a 5-foot white-tipped reef shark about 8 feet away from us. Can you believe it? He seemed content to trawl the bottom. The picture will be on the underwater roll (if by some miracle I aimed the camera correctly as I sprinted back to the pontoon boat).
Capt Paddy: "Aw, no worries mate - he ain't gonna hurt ya."
Me: "Ha. Yeah. I know."
(My two cents: this "no worries" thing is becoming cartoonish at this point.)
Later, Capt Paddy took us to Whitehaven Beach for champagne, cheese & crackers - a return to our earlier crime scene. It was great to see it from the air, we didn't realize from the boat how the white sand spilled into the bay there.
Should mention: We took two snorkeling trips in two days, the first closer to Hayman on an island reef. Between the two we saw a zillion fish, a zillion colors of coral, really weird giant clams, and played hide-and-seek with a blue-spotted sting ray.
(This might be a good time to mention that we have since determined that our previous ray encounters were not manta rays but sting rays - and the big one last week on Whitehaven Beach was probably a bull ray.) Maybe we'll find a place to develop the underwater Kodaks somewhere in NZ...
Should also mention: These pictures look like the spin-art you do at the carnival, but you're looking at miles of coral. This is exactly what it looks like - really out there. The coral grows right up to the surface of the ocean, so the top of the coral is flat and on the edges the waves break over it. 
