marinegirl

Crikey, it seems like a long time ago now, but here’s the rest of my holiday reports!After being blown out on the first couple of days, we finally managed to get underwater. Everyone else had their drysuits, and I was super-shivery in my 5mm wetsuit in the 17C water, but it was totally worth it!

Jim (Thistleton, of KI Diving Safaris) explained that the North coast of Kangaroo Island is the confluence of two major current systems, which leads to a bizarre combination of tropical and temperate species. The diversity of seagrass is just amazing, and everywhere is teeming with fish life. Jim guarentees that he’ll find you a leafy seadragon within two days, or he’ll give you another two days diving for free. That sounds pretty cocky, until you meet the guy, and you realise that he just knows the underwater environment here so well. True to his word, we found our leafy on the second dive.

By the end of the first day we were all experts at spotting the weedy seadragons, which stand out as being much bluer than the surrounding seagrass, but we had no chance at all with the leafys! Jim had to practically pick the thing up before I realised what he was trying to point out to me, and if you blinked for just a second they would disappear before your eyes! They really are masters of camouflage. But the undewater attractions don’t end with the seadragons. We had huge groupers and wrasse (bigger than me!) which followed us around, and pufferfish, and lobsters, and best of all - seals! It’s amazing how just looking at a seal can make you feel warmer! Just as we were ending our first dive we caught a glimpse of two playing below us… a teaser for what was to come.

On our final dive, we went for a ’seal dive’ - over to the rocky gullies where Jim knows they like to hang out. We quickly found three seals, who were happy to play with us and hung around for the whole dive! Before we went in, Jim taught us how to speak basic seal - we had to look fun to play with, or they would get bored quickly and move on. So there we were, akwardly somersaulting and spinning around desperately tring to entertain some very bemused looking seals! I’ve never felt so clumsy underwtaer before, they just move so quickly and elegantly through the water, it’s breathtaking. With all that underwtaer excersise I wasn’t cold for a second, and I had to keep checking my air, which was disappearing quick! It’s difficult to imagine how you could have more fun than that on a dive!

Check out some more of Rich’s underwater photos from Kangaroo Island here.

I had an AMAZING time last week - diving the outer reef with the JCU dive club on a boat called Kalinda.The weather was perfect at the start of the week, so the first stop on monday was the Yongala wreck, which totally deserves its reputation as one of the world’s best dive sites… it was absolutely fantastic! There’s usually quite a strong current over the wreck, but on our afternoon dive it was perfectly still, not a breath of current. You can barely see the wreck itself, because it’s completely covered in colourful soft corals, anemones and sponges, and huge shoals of silvery fusiliers and snappers mmake walls of fish which move and scatter as you swim through. And then there’s the big stuff. Groupers that are easliy bigger than me hiding in holes in the wreck glaring at you with their ugly faces, reef sharks and huge trevallys dart in from the blue water around to snatch little fish, and a couple of big green turtles swimming leisurely through everything. There was just so much to see it was impossible to take it all in on one dive, I could spend weeks on this site! Unfortunately you’re not allowed to go anywhere where your bubbles might touch the wreck (because it’s a grave, and they’re worried about it deteriorating), so I had to just peer into the holes in the wreckage.We then got another chance to dive the Yongala… at night. The current had picked up a bit, so we had to move carefully around staying close to the wreck to avoid getting ‘blown away’. The huge trevallys were in full hunting mode, and were using our lights to pick off little fish, so lots of them would come racing at you out of the darkness and turn right at the last minute - pretty scary! After a while we learnt to have fun by lighting up a little fish and watching as everything scrambled to eat it! There were about 10 of us in the water at once, so the wreck was lit up with a multi coloured lightshow of cyalume sticks and torch beams, which would flash like crazy when someone found something good. As we were returning back along the top edge of the deck to the shot line we found three or four huge bull rays hovering over the to pof the wreck feeding in the current, all stacked up like pancakes. It was just breathtaking to watch. They didn’t seem at all put off by us, and one brushed right past me.After a bumpy interrupted nights sleep, we woke up on the outer reef, where the water is clearest and there’s most to see. Typically we would do a couple of dives in the morning, move a bit, do an afternoon and night dive and then move further up the reef overnight. Some of the dive sites were just breathtaking, straight out of finding nemo! I can’t describve them all here or I’d go on forever! Beautiful reef drop-offs, enquisitive little reef sharks, clouds of bright blue damselfish hovering over coral bommies, quite a few turtles and rays, big pufferfish, enormous groupers and plenty of anemonefishes. Several sites had amazing caves and tunnels in the reef that you could swim through and find lots of little fishes hiding in the darkness. Unfortunately I don’t have many photos, cos my camera housing flooded Hopefully I’ll get some from the others on the trip.All in all it was an exhausting, but very fun week. Met lots of fun people too. Unfortunately it’s taken me nearly a week to get over my landsickness!

Orpheus Island Reserach Station, originally uploaded by marinegirl.I’m currently on Orpheus Island doing my scientific diver course… an island with wireless internet!We’re staying at the JCU research station, which I think can sleep about 30 in total, but theres only 10 of us here at the moment, so it’s nice and quiet. Theres four of us on my course, plus instructor, and a few other guys trying to catch damselfish for an experiment - but they’re not having much luck! Its a really good set up, lots of dive boats and equipment, aquaria, labs and a lecture theatre. We’re staying in the student digs, which are bunkbed rooms with a big communal cooking/eating/tv area. Very comfy!The island is lovely, a pretty sandy beach and some mangrovey bits in our bay, and dense vegetation behind us. I’ve put a few piccys up here. Theres no vehicles on the island (apart from a tractor to pull boats around) so I haven’t really seen much further than that. Theres a posh resort in the next bay along I think, but thats it for the whole island.We’ve been doing all sorts of rediculous diving things… using full face masks so we could talk to each other underwater today, which was a lot of fun. Underwater drilling tomorrow! All this fresh air and diving is really tiring, so I’m off to bed now, I’ll let you know how the rest of the course goes when I’m, back home!Becks