Last Thursday was Australia Day which meant a really long weekend for many people over here. I didn’t really take part in the Australia Day celebrations, instead we headed down over to Queenscliff for a long weekend of camping and diving with MUUC. With quite a few regulars away on various trips things were little quiet and there was only 5-6 of us camping and a few others joined us for dives on Saturday and Sunday.
On Thursday and Friday weather wasn’t really playing nice and we couldn’t get outside Port Phillip Heads at all because of rough seas. Another diving club had a rather nasty accident in the area just over a week ago, so we were understandably quite careful. Thursday in particular was quite bad and the only dive I got to do was a wall dive in not so good conditions.
The second dive of the day was Eliza Ramsden, an old clipper that sank in 1875 inside Port Phillip Bay near the Heads. The 27 meter long wreck is impressive enough and it’s still in reasonable shape as well. It lies in shallow water with bottom around 18 meters so bottom times can be quite long as well. Unfortunately for us swell was quite bad down there and vis wasn’t that great either. It was still a pretty nice dive, just not that good for photography. I still ended up with some ok shots, but definitely nothing too spectacular.
Luckily things got lot better on Saturday and we did some superb dives. First dive of the day for me was the J5 submarine. This submarine lies in relatively deep water with bottom around 36 meters. The sub is for the most part intact and big sections of it are covered in yellow zoanthids. In addition, there are lots of fish swimming around the sub making it a very interesting dive. The conning tower is totally covered in zoanthids and makes for a particularly impressive sight. Despite the short bottom time I found this sub far more interesting than the shallower J4 sub. I got some pretty nice shots during this dive as well.
On Sunday we did one more wreck dive. This one was a return visit to SS Coogee with Joey and Luke. Apart from some current conditions were again great for diving. We did have one minor mishap however, as the first time we went down we actually missed the wreck and had to regroup at the surface. Second attempt went better and we ended up close to the bow. We started heading towards the stern and ran into another group of divers near the boilers going in opposite direction. After spending some time around the stern taking photos we had to leave due to deco limit. For me the dive technically ended up as a decompression dive as my computer entered deco mode just as we were starting to head up. In practice that deco time had already cleared when we got to the safety stop depth. While conditions were not quite as ideal as last time the wreck provided some nice photo opportunities again.
For the final dive of the trip we visited a “secret” dive site near Barwon Heads. As we were already out of full air tanks I ended up joining the dive midway with a half-used tank from a earlier dive. Therefore my dive ended up a pretty short one, but despite the poor vis and nasty surge it was still worth it. The site has probably the most interesting bottom formations I have seen in Melbourne with loads of overhangs and swimthroughs. In addition the fish life down there was quite amazing.
Despite the somewhat disappointing Thursday and Friday it was a great weekend of diving. In particular I really enjoyed the chance to visit so many great wrecks and ended up with quite a few pretty photos!
