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Between the poor winter weather, couple of colds and the New Zealand trip there were precious little opportunities for diving in June and July. It took until August for me to get back in the ocean. By far the longest break I have had since I broke my arm!

After a few mishaps we got down to Flinders and started preparing for the dive. It was quite windy but otherwise a pleasant winter day and we were looking forward to a decent dive.

Unfortunately the conditions underwater were rather poor. Visibility was quite bad and there was a lot of organic junk floating around. Not the ideal conditions for photos! Not that there was that much to see anyway, just a few fish. Not even a single seadragon in sight!

Luckily our second dive at Rye turned out better. This side of the peninsula is more exposed to northerly winds and it was rather choppy on the surface. Due to several delays during the day it was also getting quite late and by the time we got in the water it was already getting close to dusk.

Luckily this dive was lot more pleasant than the one at Flinders. Apart from slight choppiness the conditions were ok and visibility was ok as well. There was decent amount of marine life too, including several seahorses and lots of crabs. Some of the others saw an octopus too but I missed that.

After a couple of weeks it was time to head back for more shore dives, this time with just Walson. It was a beautiful sunny winter day if a touch windy. We started our day at Blairgowrie, pretty much always a safe choice.

The pier didn’t disappoint this time either. This was the best dive I have done in a long while and decent length too at 53 minutes. We saw several seahorses, pretty seastars, a few nudibranchs and a fiddler ray. And to make it even better there was a massive school of salmon swimming around. Sadly they never let me get close enough to take a good shot with the macro lens but it was still a very impressive sight and they stayed around for ages.

Our second dive at Rye was nice too, even if it wasn’t quite as good as Blairgowrie. We saw more seahorses, lots of crabs and decent variety of fish species. There was also a lot of jellyfish floating around in the water.

We also had a look at Elsa’s reef bit further away from the pier. Unfortunately this artificial reef has suffered some serious damage over the winter months and most of the structure has collapsed. A shame really, it was shaping up as a nice addition to the normal pier dive.

Despite the minor letdown at Elsa’s this was still an excellent day of diving. It definitely feels that the worst of winter is now over and we are heading towards spring!

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 25th, 2013 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Australia, Diving, Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.