Good dives in New South Wales

There are loads of good spots in NSW, I've only visited a few and most of those aren't on the list below. For more info check out Diving in NSW a great site with lots of dives described. Most of the hyperlinks in the text connect to pages on that site.

Index

Shark Point, Sydney

This is the best of the "non-technical" dives I've done in Sydney. Just off Clovelly Pool there's a long slab of rock, extending about 150m out, see this rough map scanned from my log book for details. If the waves aren't too bad you can enter the water from that slab of rock, then a swim straight out will take you right to the interesting stuff. Sometimes when breaking waves make this entry point impossible you can still get in at the steps in the pool and then swim out. Note that it's quite shallow in the entrance though and if the waves are real big or the tide low you can get smashed against the bottom.

The nicest thing about this dive is that the bottom is so exciting, a couple of swimthroughs, large walls, a few pinnacles and other neat stuff. If the viz is good it's really nice to just swim around in midwater. A decent freediver can do most of the stuff without tanks. Even though you can find depths up to 25m most of the walls are in less than 20m of water.

Lots of animals hang around here and you can see big stingrays, lots of Port Jackson sharks, cuttlefish and of course big gropers. What many people miss is the kelp just outside the entrance to the pool. If you look carefully you can find seahorses and leafy seadragons around here. They're hard to find (I'm useless at it) but they're worth the work.
You'll find more info here.

Wreck off Bradley Head, Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour)

A few hundred meters out from the Bradley Head lighthouse there's a wreck in about 27m of water. This wreck makes a pretty exciting dive for two reasons. The first one is that few people have visited it, this is because of the second reason: It's in the middle of the shipping channel. In principle you have to obtain a permit from the water police to dive this wreck but unless you anchor on top of it noone is likely to tell them. The big problem is the Manly ferries, they pass every 20 minutes or so and they're pretty big, you really don't want to surface when they're nearby. We had worked out a plan how to avoid this. The idea was that one person should always stay in the boat while the other two were down at the wreck. Then when the people down at the wreck wanted to ascend they were to release a float attached to a line. If there were no boats around the person at the surface yanks in the line and the divers ascend.

Using a depthsounder and some reference bearings we managed to find the wreck without being ran over by the ferries. We dropped the anchor and me and my buddy started to descend. Since a ferry was approaching the boatie was pretty keen to get the anchor in and when we reached the bottom at 27m the anchor was no longer attached to the wreck. Since viz was "tea with milk" things looked pretty bad but we started to slowy swim in what we though was the right direction. After a minute or so we came out of the cloud of silt (that had been created by the anchor dragging along the bottom) and soon afterwards we found a big wall. This was the side of the ship and we swam up to the deck.

The wreck is really neat with lots of gadgets attached to it, not as stripped as the more frequently visited wrecks outside the harbour. We found the wheelhouse and my buddy swam inside (I didn't dare though). Viz was never more than a couple of meters and when the silt got stirred up it was quickly reduced to less than armslength. Since we knew that buddy contact was imperative (my buddy had the float) we stayed real close and held hands most of the time.

There was a lot of sound when the ferries passed overhead but this didn't make us nervous since we knew that the eddies from their props didn't go deeper than 15m. But five minutes into the dive we started hearing a low frequency sound that was a bit unsettling - what the heck was that ? The sound increased in intensity over the next few minutes and after a while our chests were vibrating and our heads were full of it. Then the lights went out - all of sudden everything became almost dark. We quickly grabbed the wreck and hoped for the best. It didn't get any better though, on the contrary, after a few seconds big eddies came down to the bottom and stirred up the silt. Now viz really was zero. Shortly after that it became a lot lighter though as the ship passed over us. After a minute or two the silt settled on the bottom and we continued the dive with a lightheaded feeling thinking about what a good dive story this would become !

When we had 75 bar in the tanks we started thinking about ascent. The float consisted of an empty wine bag with a 30m line attached to it. We inhaled one breath and released it. After a minute or so our boatie gave it a yank and we swam up. When we got into the boat we took a good look at the ship we'd heard earlier. It was big, about 15 000 tonnes I think. To my big surprise it turned out that my buddy had seen her before we descended ! So watch out, these aussie divers are simply nuts. Thanks JE and Ed for bringing me on this dive !

Driftdive in Nelson Bay

A few hours drive north of Sydney is Port Hacking - a very pretty estuary with good fishing and great diving. Near the entrance you'll find Nelson Bay, and the famous dive spots Fly Point and Halifax. Usually these dives are done when the tide turns since at other times the strong tidal currents make staying in one place impossible. Fly Point in particular is a fantastic dive ! There's a few big bommies that are very rich in sea life, definitely worth the drive from Sydney. We did these two dives in the day and even though they were really nice we did a dive in the evening that made both of them seem very commonplace.

We entered the water at Halifax an hour and a half after the tide started going into the bay. We were immediately taken by the current and started drifting over the bottom. The feeling was simply unreal. We were drifting with 1.5 knots over the bottom in complete silence. It was pitch dark but your torch lit up a circle of light that swept over the bottom. There were lots of fish around and every now and then you'd see something spectacular; huge sleeping rays, wobbegong sharks, Port Jackson sharks, octopi ... You wanted so often to stop to check something out more carefully but there was no way you could fight the current (at least not without losing the rest of the group).

The whole time we were swimming slowly across the current in order to avoid getting swept into the harbour. After a while we came out over the sand and then there was less life around. The dive was still great though. The sand formed big dunes and the current swept you above them, at the peaks the current sped up and you were dragged down towards the bottom - real exciting ! It was like flying over a desert full of sand dunes. After a while I got the idea of pointing my light upwards. Judge my surprise when I saw stacks of squid in the water, they were everywhere ! There were also a few 1m pipefish that were being carried by the current as well, they're really neat, they look like a long thin straw, all rigid, but when you touch them and they start swimming you see how flexible they really are.

Everything that's fun have to come to an end and after about 40min we reached "the pipeline", a sewer that stretches a few hundred meters out from the shore. This was our "catcher" and we surfaced. We immediately saw the light on the shore where Angie, our driver, was faithfully waiting for us. I was really hyped and started talking to Kath, my buddy the second I broke the surface. She looked very puzzled and after a while I realised I'd been speaking in swedish ... Well, that dive really blew my head off !

Thanks Daryl and Angie for excellent navigating and groundsupport respectively !

Here's more info about Port Stephens diving.

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P-G Martinsson pgm@math.chalmers.se
Last modified: Sun Feb 2 19:03:23 MET 1997