Yesterday I went diving with MUUC again. Despite the warm and sunny weather most people were busy with other stuff and this was actually my quietest morning with MUUC thus far. There were just three of us (Luke, Kath and me) heading out from the shed which made things little tricky with the boat. Luckily we got everything sorted out on the way to Queenscliff and ended up having a great day of diving!

First dive of the day was SS Coogee, an impressive old wreck. Coogee is an old steamship originally built in 1887 and scuttled in 1928 in the Ship’s Graveyard outside Port Phillips Heads. It lies in around 32 meters of water with the bottom around stern slightly deeper than that. Originally Coogee was 69 meters long, but now most of the ship is gone. The bow, the stern (including the impressive rudder quadrant now covered in yellow zoathids) and the two boilers are still in pretty good shape, however.

While sea conditions on the surface were quite rough, underwater things were great with superb visibility! Coogee offers some great photo opportunities and I ended up with some quite nice shots. I’m also starting to get hang of using the strobes with a fisheye lens, adding the diffusors helps a lot. Not that things were exactly perfect yet, I did end up with strobes showing up in some of the shots. But that was pretty easily fixed with some cropping or photoshop magic.

Coogee is bit deep for photo dive, especially with 12 liter air tanks. We got close to deco limits well before running low on air and had to head up after a relatively short dive. Bit of a shame really, I would have loved to spend more time down there. With the depth it’s pretty perfectly suited for nitrox which unfortunately isn’t available through MUUC.

After Coogee and a quick visit back to Queenscliff we headed out for the second dive of the day. This was an OW level dive at Pope’s Eye. Underwater conditions were lot better than last time I was there, visibility was significantly better and current was bit weaker as well. With lots of colorful fish, a visit from a pair of seals and a ray circling around us, the sights didn’t disappoint either. This was the first dive I actually tried the zoom ring I recently bought for the Tokina lens. The ring worked well enough and was pretty easy to use underwater. While none of the photos I took were truly spectacular, I did get some pretty decent shots during this dive as well.

During the day I was also testing some cheap dive torches that I recently bought as spares. They were quite bright (Cree T6 led) and I didn’t notice any issues underwater either, so I was pretty happy with the purchase. Main beam is pretty tight with decent amount of spill as well. With only one 18650 battery they are also quite light and should make excellent travel torches.

I have been pretty slow uploading new photos, my bandwidth is still pretty limited so I try to do the uploads when it doesn’t come out of my own data cap (city library WLAN works reasonably well for this). Today I took the time to get some diving shots from recent dives online, these include Mornington Pier on 30th December, more Seadragons at Flinder’s Pier on 10th January and some Seahorses and fisheye lens shots under Rye Pier on 10th January. I have also updated the relevant posts with photo links.

I also reorganized the Diving section of my photo gallery. Albums are now split to a few different categories which should make browsing a lot easier. Unfortunately, the Gallery software ended up having some problems with these changes. At the moment the only visible issue is the lack of album cover for Finland dives, but I need to see how to fix it anyway as there might be some other problems in the long run.

I spent the weekend camping at Rosebud with MUUC. Rosebud is a popular camping destination on the Mornington Peninsula and reasonably close to boat ramps and shore dive sites on the eastern side of the Heads. Since we did a night dive in the Saturday evening and got up pretty early on Sunday, we didn’t actually spend that much on the camp site itself. And if you ask me, it’s not real camping when there are three different fast food restaurants and various shops right next to the camping area…

Diving itself was decent enough, our first dive on Saturday at Portsea Hole ended up a really short one. Apparently we missed the right spot and ended up with with pretty much nothing interesting to see. We aborted the dive quite early, bottom time was only 12 minutes. Instead, we moved to another area and did a pretty nice drift dive. The four of us hang to a rope and went with the current. The site was bit deeper than expected (max depth 26 meters) and our rope was little short, so things got little crowded at times. Still, a nice dive with interesting corals and decent variety of fish.

Tthe best dive of the day was definitely the night dive at Rye Pier, though. We ended up seeing lots of stuff, including more seahorses, different crabs (including really small baby ones) and even a blue-ringed octopus. While blue-ringed octopuses are not very aggressive, they are extremely venomous. A bite will lead to motor paralysis and respiratory arrest within minutes and can easily kill a human unless first aid and hospital treatment are quickly available. Incidents are quite rare though, and we had no problems either.

On Sunday we got up quite early, but due to various delays it took quite a while to actually get everything ready for a boat dive. Original plan was to visit the J4 sub again as some people missed it the last time. As we reached the Heads the seas were really choppy, though, and we ended up turning back. We did a pretty cool dive at Pope’s Eye  inside the Heads instead. With a huge variety of different fish species and some visits from seals, it ended up a really nice dive. There were also plenty of small jellies in the water, but apparently they are not really poisonous. I was still little worried as I didn’t know that until after the dive.

Original plan was to do a total of three dives on Sunday. I ended up skipping the second one (Portsea Hole again, apparently they found the correct site this time) and spent the time on the shore instead. Unfortunately, due to delays in the morning we ended up calling the day after the boat came back, and I only got to do that one dive on Sunday. Luckily the weather got really nice during the day, a welcome change after a cool and rainy week.

A pretty good weekend of diving, even though there were not that many good photo opportunities. I’m also still having trouble with Tokina fisheye and strobe placement, lightning for most shots (especially for night dive) ended up pretty bad. I was planning to give strobe diffusors a try, but forgot to put them on. That’s something to remember for the next dive trip! And as the zoom ring for the Tokina lens arrived by courier today, things should be quite a bit easier in the future anyway.

Today I headed out with Alex and Joey for a day of shore diving, this also gave me a chance to test my new lens. We did two pretty nice dives during the day, dive sites were Flinders Pier and Rye Pier. We ended up skipping the night dive though, as seas got quite rough in the evening and wetsuit divers were getting pretty cold from chilly weather and occasional light rain. No big deal, we’ll do that at a later date.

First dive was at Flinders Pier, we were there pretty much only to take more shots of weedy seadragons. We hit high tide pretty nicely, so far so good. Unfortunately there was some swell and visibility wasn’t that great, but conditions were still much better than last time. It took a while to see our first seadragon, then we started meeting more of them and finally there were lots around us. So lot of targets to photograph, though swell made things bit tricky at times and I’m still waiting for that perfect seadragon shot. I brought my 60mm macro lens for this one as using the new fisheye would have been kinda pointless when only interesting target down there was the seadragons.

Second dive was at Rye Pier, the site was bit of an unknown and we didn’t have a clear picture of what to expect. Spirits were little low as we entered water as people were feeling wet and cold after some rain. Things changed underwater though, it was a really superb dive and we ended up seeing lots of different stuff. We met lots of seahorses (first ones for me!), several crabs doing cool stuff and even a large stingray. I missed the last one, but all in all it was a very nice dive with lots to see and great conditions; vis was good and there was no swell. It was easily the best shore dive I have done in Victoria so far.

Most of the cool stuff we met in Rye was quite small, so my Tokina was bit wasted on this one. I did get some nice wide-angle shots of divers and the pylons though, so it wasn’t a total loss. Really need to do a second dive there with a macro lens though. Even if the lens wasn’t a perfect match for the site, it definitely has great potential with good subjects as long as vis is at least decent (like on this dive). Using strobes with the lens can be quite tricky though, it’s very easy to get hot-spots with a lens as wide as this. And my efforts at close-up shots didn’t end so well, but that’s at least partially caused by the fact that I don’t have the zoom ring yet (found a cheap one though and already ordered!), so I was stuck at the widest setting of 10mm for the whole dive.

Definitely bringing this lens along for all dives with a good chance of seeing some bigger stuff!

After some delays the Tokina fisheye lens I ordered recently arrived today.  At around 450 euros the lens itself wasn’t that pricy, but as the dome port (and port base) for underwater use were actually more expensive than that, the whole thing still ended up quite a big investment.

The lens is not really that useful for normal photography as fisheye distortion (straight lines becoming curved near image edges) is quite heavy especially on the wide end. Topside it’s only suitable for some special occasions and fun/joke shots. Technically you can remove the fisheye distortion in postprocessing, but as this will affect the photo framing it’s by no means a perfect replacement for (more expensive!) rectilinear wide-angle lenses.

Underwater it’s a whole different story. Tokina 10-17 is  one of the most popular wide-angle lenses for underwater use. The focal length range makes it pretty optimal for underwater wide-angle shots (on cropped cameras) and the short minimum focus distance of 14 cm allows one to get really close to the target (almost always a big plus in water!). The fisheye effect is also much less pronounced underwater.

Well, that’s the theory anyway, I’m heading out tomorrow for some shore diving to test the lens in practice. Assuming the conditions are decent that is, if vis is too bad I’ll probably just focus on some macro work and test it later.