I know I should be blogging all sorts of great stuff about my kids and maybe I will, but today I'm back in the water. Or rather I was yesterday. A warm start to the day meant an early walk for Rowlf. We went to Manly where the ocean was a bit dumpy and ordinary. However on the way we had walked past Fairlight where the harbour was flat and clear and inviting. I got my pass from Sal, grabbed my freedive gear and headed back out.
It started well; I got a parking spot pretty close to the water. I pulled on the bottom half of my 3mm wettie, grabbed the rest of my gear and headed to the water. I walked to the rocks at the edge of the beach, got the rest of my gear on and slid into the water. It looked pretty clear, and at 21 degrees was plenty warm enough. I headed straight out over the kelp, heading for the drop off. It only drops from 3 or 4 to about 7m, so it isn't exactly a plunge into the abyss, but the drop is fairly vertical in places and quite pretty.
I dropped down into a hole in the kelp to make sure I could clear my ears and that my mask wasn't leaking - all good. Fairlight is neither as warm or clear as Fiji, so my heart rate was up a bit and breathhold ability was down a bit down to begin with. I became fairly comfortable fairly quickly and headed down to the sand at about 7m. There is a small wreck at Fairlight that I've found once before while on breath hold, and as usual I didn't find it yesterday. The wall had the sparse soft corals and sponges I remember and the a few fish about. I didn't spend too long looking for the wreck because a) it isn't that impressive when you do find it b) if you don't find the wreck you don't find much apart from sand and shell-grit, and c) from the bottom I couldn't see the surface...and that still creeps me out a bit.
I toyed with the idea of heading out a little further and seeing how deep I could go (which was unlikely to be more than 9m unless I was going to start digging) but the water was a little green and sharky-looking and I was dressed like a seal; I decided to head for the shallower water to the east of the beach. At the rock wall behind the pool I found some good sized schools of blackfish, a scorpionfish, some old wives, stripey, seargant baker and small wrasse - the usual suspects. I was sticking my head under boulders in the hope of finding a eastern blue devil, but that was a long shot and I had no luck. I saw a good sized tail disappear under a rock and went to investigate, only briefly entertaining the thought that it could be a shark. It wasn't; it was a large blue grouper that I spent the next few minutes playing hide and seek with. I had the distinct disadvantage of having to keep surfacing for air, but he was doing OCD laps of a rocky swim through and wasn't tough to find. I didn't manage to get close enough to scratch him under the chin, despite trying, and I decided to leave him alone and keep moving along the wall.
I found a couple of small cuttlefish in a narrow gap between the wall and a boulder. They were using their feeding arms to grab food from sponges, something I'd not seen before. Not far away, on the sand, I spotted a cowfish. I'd already seen a porcupine fish; things were going very well. Each time I surfaced I was coming up through decent sized schools of fish. It was lovely. I kept moving east towards what I call "the blue room". It is a smallish space that sits in the shadow of a block of units, the effect being that the typically greenish water suddenly appears far more blue. You have a vertical wall each side and a nice swimt through and some little undercuts to nose around in. Fairly close to the blue room I found a wobbegong resting under a rock. I laid out full length close-ish to him to get an idea of how big he was; I'd say about 5ft.
I'd seen a load of divers starting to gear up so I headed back towards where I thought they would head; I like to drop down on scuba divers when I'm tank free, give them a little wave and then swim off horizontally. It'a the little things...They seemed to be taking forever to gear up, and I realised that on these shallow shore dives I really do not miss the tanks or the fart-arsing about. I dropped down a few more times, finding another cuttlefish and a cone shell. Or a cone-shaped shell. Plenty more fish, soft corals and sponges, a lot of urchins. The divers were taking way too long, so I headed back to shore, hoping up on the rocks just as the first of them were heading in.
I was a very happy camper after that. It never ceases to amaze me how good the diving can be around the Sydney shore. Especially when you've left your camera at home.
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