Back to Diving – Ozone and Portarlington Pier

On Sunday I finally had a chance to get back underwater. Weather was pretty nice so there were quite a few of us heading down to the coast. We did two shore dives on the Bellarine Peninsula, both were new sites for me which is always nice. The drop in water temperature due to the recent cold weather has been quite dramatic (water was down to 13-14 °C) and since I was the only one in a drysuit the dives were pretty short.

Our first dive of the day was at Portarlington Pier. I had heard some negative things about this pier in the past so I wasn’t really expecting that much. In practice the dive wasn’t too bad, just really shallow (it wasn’t quite high tide yet). Despite the rather poor visibility there was still stuff to see. The pier itself is quite interesting with all the underwater structures covered in marine growth. We  also saw some juvenile fish, a lone fiddler ray and a couple of nudibranchs.

I was also testing some new gear on this dive, both my new smaller dry gloves and my Transpac’s crotch strap worked fine. I did have some minor problems with my drysuit, the neck seal seems to have stretched quite a bit and there was little leakage while on the surface. It was a really minor problem though and I already have a replacement seal ordered. My arm injury didn’t really give me any issues either, just to be safe I swam to the shore instead of climbing back to the pier when we were finished.

As the second dive of the day we did the Ozone wreck. Ozone is an old Paddle Steamer scuttled as a breakwater at the Intended Head in 1925. We got there pretty much exactly at the high tide but it was still a very shallow dive (max depth 3 meters). The wreck itself is quite interesting, the boilers are still pretty much intact and there’s lots of other structures left as well. There are also several easy swim throughs where you can pass under or through the wreck. Most of the interesting stuff is in a small area and we did several rounds around the wreck even during our short dive.

I had switched to my fisheye lens for this dive. Unfortunately in my haste I had forgotten to turn the internal flash back on and I had to manage without my strobes. Luckily there was enough natural light for decent shots. Unfortunately some areas like the boilers were simply too dark without extra light. The site is worth a return visit anyway, especially on a sunny day the wreck seems pretty well-suited for some over-under shots.

I have also been experimenting quite a bit with other photo galleries since my web host seems unwilling to fix the configuration problem with Gallery3. So far NextGEN Gallery seems like the best bet and I will be using it for future galleries (and updating any past ones in the near future). As a WordPress plugin it also integrates nicely with the rest of the site. While it’s not quite as feature rich as Gallery3, it still provides all the basic functionality and it’s easily modifiable for fancier features. Plus there’s a Lightroom plugin available which makes my life a lot easier.

• 2012-10-28 Castle Rock & dolphin encounter

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