marinegirl

Well I finally made it over to Magnetic Island yesterday, to do some shore diving with a few guys from the dive club. We got up super early, took the ferry over and had breakfast at one of the (many) backpacker places before driving over to ‘Pleasure Divers’ to hire some tanks.We did a shore dive in Geoffrey Bay, right by the dive centre on a little wreck called the Moltke. You can read the story about it here. I had been warned that the vis probably wouldn’t be great, but I was amazed at how much we saw! The wreck is just 100m or so off the beach and is really shallow, between 4m and 8m - almost a snorkelling wreck! Our navigation was pretty rubbish though, we’d be swimming fine on our bearing then would get distracted by a fish or something, and then we’d get lost, poke our heads up to check the bearing and be amost 90 degrees out! There was lots to see in the seagrass and coral bommies on the way, brightly coloured nudibranchs, little gobies, a lobster and a lionfish.The wreck itself is beatutiful. It looks as though it’s completely made out of coral now, and theres still enough structure left standing for there to be little swim throughs and stuff. Someone who knew more about boats than me could probably tell what bits were, but I would guess at a bow and a mast or two. There were schools of yellow and silver snappers everywhere, big batfish hanging around the edges of the wreck, a couple of boisterous unicorn fishes zipping around the top, and some HUGE angelfish at a cleaning station - where they get cleaned by little cleaner wrasse. I’ll have to find pictures of all these for the non marine biologists, so you know what I’m talking about! The fish didn’t seem to mind divers being there at all, usually they scatter when you get close, but swimming through a bit of the wreck I was practically brushing them out of the way. Then just as we were about to leave the wreck a big green turtle came past too, which was fantastic. All of this just off the shore and a half hour ferry ride from home!Because it’s so shallow we were underwater for over an hour, even on little tanks, and the water was a toasty 28C - I was hot in my 5mm wetsuit. By the time we all got back on the beach we decided there wasn’t enough time for anpther dive AND food before places started to close, so we had a vote and decided to head to the pub. We didn’t think anything could top the first dive. So we had a nice afternoon with a few jugs of cold beer and some pub grub before catching the ferry home. Really great day - Maggie is beautiful and I’ll have to go back soon to explore more. A few more photos on flickr.