3 mile reef

You gotta love the Ozzy way of saying it like it is. So we headed out to a couple of dive sites along the line of reef, out from the harbour at Hillarys.

It was an interesting start to the diving day due to the fact that I just heard about the latest white pointer attack as I was driving towards the harbour, so was naturally a little bit more nervous than usual. The sharks are always there of course, but 5 fatal attacks in 10 months does make you think and pay a bit more attention on a safety stop, hanging mid-water!

Besides that though, the dives were pretty good with a classic dive plan of "drop in off the boat and cruise around a bit" in a group. And I do forget sometimes that I've done a few dives, but when you see the new divers not knowing which way around to setup their gear and struggle to clear their ears in the water as they drop like a stone, you have to chuckle to yourself...while helping them of course.

So we set off in a group although with two of us doing a camera dive we were quickly left behind by some of the buddy pairs as they tore off through the water in search of everything :)

The first site was similar topography to most Perth based dives with the most interesting thing being a HUGE Cowrie shell. Huge being relative of course and it's hard to tell but it was about 20cm across, about 4 times the usual size.

Trust me, this was a big fellah

Then I had a quick in-between bounce dive as the anchor got stuck in some reef so I jumped back in to free it and float it out the way with a lift bag, was like the old days of working back on the boats in Cairns (without the bourbon).

Discovered an interesting piece of jetsam on the last dive, which was like the base of large traffic cone. So I freed that and towed it around with me on the dive, playing with it to create some fun photo ops with my fellow divers.

A gloved finger sneaking in the shot....

As ever, more photos on picasa.