Over the last few months I have been very busy with diving. It was just seven months ago when I did my 200th dive near Brisbane and now it was already time for my 300th during the Easter break!
Unfortunately we didn’t manage to organize a major trip for Easter despite several tentative plans. Local forecast for the long weekend wasn’t looking that great for diving either. Luckily conditions slowly improved we finally had enough people signed up for Easter Monday to take the boat out.
So off we went to Queenscliff for some easy boat dives inside the Bay. We had plenty of new club members with us so we started out simple and did Pope’s Eye first. I sat this one out as we already had a full boat. Besides, I only needed to do two out of three planned dives to reach my 300th so no big harm done.
For the second dive we waited for slack and then headed for Lonsdale Wall. This was one of those days when slack water didn’t really happen, we had a fair bit of current running even though we were there right on time. It wouldn’t have been a huge issue normally, but with the new people on the boat it made things little bit trickier.
But I still needed to get at least a short dive done to get my 300th that day! So I hopped in by myself for a quick and easy solo dive. To keep things safe I stayed fairly shallow and kept my dive time short too. By the end of my dive current was picking up anyway, on the bottom I could stay sheltered next to the reef but during the safety stop I was definitely drifting a fair distance. To my annoyance I also noticed that my new neck seal was leaking a little. Apparently I hadn’t done a good enough job while gluing it on. Hopefully I can still get it fixed and don’t have to redo the whole thing!
With the dive number 299 out of the way it was time for something more exciting! For the third dive of the day we headed just a short distance away from Queenscliff and got ready for a drift dive. The current close to the Heads can get pretty crazy sometimes and this was definitely one of those days.
I did my 200th with my speedos on, now it was time for a proper naked dive! I stripped down and Evan dropped me off the boat with Seth, Alycia and Keith and off we went with the current.
I didn’t bring my camera along for this one, you can’t really take photos while hanging on a line in a roaring current anyway. Visibility wasn’t that good (around 3 meters), which was kind of a mixed blessing. On one hand it gave me some extra decency. But it also made me crash straight into a bommie that appeared out of nowhere! Suddenly there was a big ledge straight in front me and I simply couldn’t ascend quickly enough to avoid it. Luckily I only hit my hand on the reef and nothing more delicate!
After that incident the rest of the dive went smoothly. By the end of the dive I was starting to shiver a little bit in the 18 degree water, in total the dive lasted 30 minutes. Good thing we came up too, we had drifted a long way with the current and were getting pretty close to the shipping channel by the time we got back on the boat.
It was definitely a pretty exciting and definitely memorable way to “celebrate” my 300th dive. Not sure what I’ll come up with for my 400th!
