Australia Diving - Julian Rocks

The Nursery and The Needles

Tuesday 23rd December, 2008
 

This was a fabulous day of diving.  On the dives yesterday, there was a freediver (Henk, from South Africa) that happened to be staying at my hotel.  In the shop yesterday, we both ended up talking to Keiran about other diving when he recommended Julian Rocks.  I am without a car here, but Henk thought he could borrow his cousin's car.  And the plans were made to drive about an hour and a half south to Byron Bay to dive Julian Rocks with Sundive.  This was a first-class dive op, with a routine down for how to load and unload their boat, how to launch, and with high quality friendly people all around.  This was a nice change from yesterday, when I wasn't as impressed with the dive op.  (See yesterday's dive report here.)

After we launched the RIB from the beach, we sailed out on kind of rough seas to Julian Rocks, only about 10 minutes away.  And I finally got to execute a back roll entry, after learning about it in open water class a long time ago.  Kind of fun, really.  The first dive site was "The Nursery."

On the first dive, I was buddied with Henk.  And in contrast to most of my dives in Thailand, there wasn't a dive master assigned to us.  There was one dive master in the water with the whole group, which consisted of four buddy teams.  The plan was to stay together, but since we are all certified divers, if any buddy team got separated, we were to continue the dive (as long as the team was still together).  We dropped down the mooring line and within 30 seconds I was staring at a carpet shark.  The locals call them Wobbegongs.  Not sure where that name comes from...  We continued on the dive and I saw about five or six more carpet sharks before finally calming my excitement down enough to focus on other life.  And the reef was covered in life.  Corals, anemones, sea stars, urchins, feather stars, tunicates, sponges, and lots of large and small reef fish.  Since I was going slow taking pictures, Henk and I got separated from the other groups and the dive master.  No big deal, we just kept diving.  There was quite a bit of current, so we just let the current take us wherever it wanted.  We were told it would be a live boat pick-up.  We kept going until we got to our prescribed maximum dive time and began our ascent.  After our safety stop, we continued to the surface and signaled the boat to come pick us up.  Once we were all on board, we headed back to shore to start the process all over again for the next dive.

After topping off the tank at the shop and loading a different boat, I went back out for another dive while Henk stayed at the shop talking with some of the other divers.  The second dive was on a site called, "The Needles."  This dive was just as cool, with even more variety.  We dropped down the line and my dive buddy was taking pictures, so I swam over to see what he was looking at and found a turtle just sitting on the bottom.  As usual, we saw quite a few carpet sharks, but also two huge lobsters, a fairly good size bull ray, and quite a few different nudibranchs.  The topography was very cool, with boulders and reef all over.  One spot called "The Smile" was a big crack in a rock with a lobster, hundreds of small shrimp, and a few carpet sharks hanging out inside the crack.  In looking at my pictures of the lobster, it almost looks like there was a cuttlefish there also.  I'm bummed I didn't see it the first time, but I recall really fighting the current here to get decent pictures.  The current and surge were both conspiring against my picture-taking here.  But the dives were both amazing.

Below are some pictures from the diving.  A few of them turned out alright.  Click on the image to see a larger version. 

(Note: None of the images were "photoshopped" in any way.)