Wednesday, June 1, 2011

The good, bad and the ugly

After my garden bashing and several weekends of DIY round the house I needed to escape to the sea and J was as ever happy to let me (I got a good catch - do you like that, keeping in with the sea theme....)

Anyway, moving on. Soooo, jumped on a dive charter with Dolphin Scuba (not Dolphin Dive in case you get mixed up like I do) and we headed off over to Rottnest for a couple of dives.

Was blowing a bit and swell from the NW, so we headed to the SE side of the island for some shelter and ended up at the site that J and I did with Dolphin Dive (yep the other guys) over Easter. Is a pretty good wall dive with some good shoals of fish and drops off to around 25m if you want to get some depth in for a change.

The Bad
My poor old Lumix camera has been struggling of late and the "plastic bag" underwater housing I have discovered is great for 10m, maybe 15m....but deeper than that it compacts so much it has been interfering with the lens as it moves in and out on a motor as you turn it on. So "the bad" was that this final dive has killed it I think and maybe didn't help that to even close the lens I had to blow some air into it (at depth - no, not included in your normal PADI course) and some water got it as well!? So think it's back to the drawing board for a new underwater camera plan....

The Good
For the second dive we moved on a bit more south of the island to a site I hadn't been to before, which had a "ripper" of a current at depth and then some fun swell in around the reef. Lots of really good hard coral and an real good sized Cuttlefish hiding in a hole (pretty good, but wait for it). Then on the way back to the boat we saw one, then another BIGGEST RAYS YOU HAVE EVER SEEN!!! At least 2m across and 3m plus tip to tail, so we were happy to hang about 5m above them (close enough, thank you!) and watch them swim around and harass each other. MUCHO AWESOME, and not very often that I get to some something very different under the water, so like it :)

Looking them up when I got home they were Smooth Stingrays.

The Ugly
The wind picked up on the way home (as expected) and was blowing about 25kts, so a fun ride back and some pretty green looking people on the back deck. I did my usual on a moving "thing" and fell asleep.

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