Despite the windy weather there were five of us heading down the coast last Sunday. Alex and Dean wanted to test their new gear and Michelle and James came along as well. The forecast was for heavy winds so I only brought along my fisheye lens, my previous experience with shooting macro in shallow waters and big waves have been pretty miserable.
Our first dive was at Rye Pier. It’s almost time for the annual spider crab season, but it’s not quite here yet. We only saw a couple of stragglers, in a week or two there should be hundreds or thousands there. Otherwise it was another quality dive at Rye, the recent winds and rain had muddied the waters a bit but visiblity wasn’t too bad. Unfortunately my drysuit’s neck seal was leaking quite a bit, we did a pretty long dive and at the end I was feeling rather wet and very miserable.
After a quick lunch we headed to our second site, Blairgowrie Pier. This is a popular training site and there were several other divers in the area, including Carol and Mal who had somehow missed our dive announcement. It was pretty low tide by then, but luckily the site has bit more depth than most piers in the area (around 5 meters at the end). This time the neck seal was leaking a lot less, but with soaked clothing under the drysuit this was still a pretty cold dive for me.
Blairgowrie is easy enough dive and the underside of the pier is pretty interesting with quite a bit of fish life. The definite highlight of the dive were the nudibranchs though, we saw at least three different species. I really need to get back there with my macro lens for some proper shots!
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