I spent the last weekend diving on Phillip Island with MUUC. It was a joint trip with the mountaineering club and we stayed in a proper (and pretty fancy!) house instead of camping. After quite a few initial problems at the shed on Friday we finally got both the boats and the compressor on the road. While Phillip Island has a lot of stuff to see on the land as well (including the famous Penguin Parade), this was pretty much a pure diving trip for us and we didn’t really do any sightseeing.
The second dive was at the Pinnacles, a popular local site with two pinnacles raising from around 40 meters to 12 meters. Unfortunately, our shot line moved a bit and ended up in the wrong spot. I had already gone down with Shawn before anyone noticed this so we ended up in midwater with nothing special to see. At 20 meters we could barely see the bottom (somewhere around 30-40 meters) but there was nothing else visible. I was already considering heading back up but then Shawn noticed some shapes in the distance and we ended up finding some smaller pinnacles. They were not that impressive though, and while there were two of them, it became clear that they couldn’t be the pinnacles we were supposed to dive as their tops were at around 20 meters. Near the top surge got little annoying and there was quite a bit of current too. Just as we were getting back on boat a pod of 5 or 6 dolphins came to the area. They ended up visiting some of our divers still underwater, unfortunately I only saw them from the surface and didn’t really have chance to take any photos either.
The second dive of the day was at Pyramid Rock, a famous landmark near George Kermode. None of us had dived here before and we couldn’t find any real GPS markers, so most of the dive was spent exploring. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any of the more impressive features that should have been down there, but it was still a pretty good dive and quite different to most sites I have done in Victoria. The area was almost completely covered in kelp forests and while there were no proper walls, the bottom was still quite varied with boulders and smaller holes. I also ended up seeing my first Port Jackson Shark just lying on the bottom, unfortunately in a pretty protected area so I wasn’t able to get a good shot.
After the second dive we headed back to Melbourne, cleaned the boats and rinsed the gear. Then I headed to a hostel where I was staying overnight before leaving for Sydney early on Monday morning. The weekend as a whole was another great diving trip with MUUC, too bad it will be a while before I can dive with these guys again as I will be spending a few weeks over in Sydney next before heading back to Melbourne.
