The Great Sea Reef Is Fiji’s Wildest Dive, and a New Frontier for Conservation

I was scuba diving in the Great Sea Reef (traditionally named Cakaulevu in Fijian), a 280-mile-long underwater paradise in northeast Fiji. Relatively unknown, with only a single scuba diving lodge that has direct access to it, this place is the third-largest coral reef system in the world. More than three-quarters of all coral species known to science live and grow here, as do more than half of all recognized fish.

The Great Sea Reef, nicknamed the GSR, is also a growing hub of conservation research. In July 2026, a new partnership between the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI), PADI AWARE (the affiliated NGO), and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) was launched to push community-backed ocean conservation. A key part of this is PADI AWARE’s new Global Shark & Ray Census, an ambitious project to collect data that PADI and WWF can use to inform governments, in Fiji and beyond, for the creation of new Marine Protected Areas. This recent collaboration made our morning shark sighting even more exciting—and meaningful.

“We are bringing together PADI’s 30-million-plus certified divers and 6,600 dive centers with WWF’s conservation work in over 100 countries,” says Ian Campbell, a driving force behind the collaboration and the programs director of PADI AWARE.

In visiting the GSR, I was experiencing firsthand how travelers can experience this ecosystem and be a part of an innovative approach to protecting coral reefs. When I saw the lone bull shark, I wrote “bull shark: 1” in my waterproof notebook. The scribble was below my other excited notes from that same dive that read: “leopard shark! Amazing: 1” and “white-tipped reef shark: 2”. This underwater note-taking is the first step of the shark and ray census; the logging would happen when we returned to land.

When our dive ended a few minutes later, I rose to the surface, joining a group of scuba divers who were scrambling aboard our aluminum boat. Everyone, including Leone Vokai, founder of Great Sea Reef Divers and the diver who’d signaled the shark, was grinning. We stripped out of our gear and soaked wetsuits, whooping and chattering, as Leone’s crew passed out mugs of warming lemongrass tea and ginger cookies. The boat angled toward the shoreline and picked up speed: it was time to get back to the resort for a seafood lunch and logging.