Bare Island

• Bare Island
• approx. 11:00 - 12:00
• vis. variable, murky in close, 5m out near front of island
• 21 degrees
• Flat seas, no wind, clear blue skies

It has been a while since either JCJ or I had dived Bare Island on the north side of Botany Bay so it was good to be back. We were both keen for a bimble dive, so we picked this easy site and typically enough the seas were flat and there was no wind or cloud so we could have dived anywhere. When we want to do Shark Point it will, of course, be howling. It looked lovely from the car park and, as usual, we headed towards the water expecting great things from the visibility but knowing the site expectign to be disappointed. We jumped in and were immediately disappointed. The water was what Dulux could name Bare Island green. Ah well.

We dived the Western side of the island. Our plan had been to dive the wall to the eastern side. However, the bridge to the island (remember that from Mission Impossible II?) was being repaired and we decided to err on the side of caution and not risk swimming under it and having a pole driven on top of us. So we took a bearing and headed over through the greenish water.

The start of the dive was rather dis heartening as we found very little fixed life and few fish. There were a couple of flathead, I pissed off a blennie that attacked me as I approached his home (a broken bottle) and that was about it. But as we continued on our way the vis improved somewhat and we started to find a bit more life. We needed to get quite a way around the island before we got amongst the better but still sparse fixed life. Highlights of the dive...a couple of Blue Grouper that scared the crap out of me as they approached from behind and came over my head...they then got all friendly, followed me around and the big fella let me tickle his chin. There was a decent sized Kingfish on the hunt, a three stripe porcupine fish, a large numbray out on the sand, magpie morwong, a school of stripy, schools of yellowtail, a big octopus that I tried to entice from his hiding place by moving some of the rocks he had arranged outside of it (he was not interested), a cuttlefish, a small butterfly fish, a butterfly gurnard (JCJ spotted that, probably the best spot of the dive), a trumpetfish and another cool JCJ spot, a grenadier curled up against a shell on the sand.

OK, reading that back and it appears that the dive was, in fact, far better than it seemed to be at the time. Weird. Maybe we didn't recover from our initial disappointment? I felt a little chilly on the dive; somehow I managed to get some water coming in the back of my suit - no idea how.

So it was, in fact, a ver nice dive. I look forward to going back, with a camera, and once the water starts to chill and (I hope) the port jackson sharks arrive for their winter residence in the cave we turned the dive just before.