Fairy Bower

• Mid tide, in at about 11:00
• 7m for about 55min
• 22degrees (according to my guage)
• Kinda murky
• JCJ and me

A lovely warm summer day on which to have a gentle shore dive. JCJ was getting over a bout of iffy-ear so we chose the Bower because it's shallow and easy and (let's hope the missus isn't reading) if he could not equalise I could still go out for a bimble around. With the sharks. As it happens his ears were fine so there was no call for a solo dive (don't try that at home kids, it's dangerous and silly) and there were none of the sharks to be seen.

We wandered past the beach polluted sign (pah!) and descended into water murkier than we thought it would be. Bugger. Nevermind, onwards and outwards and instead of heading left we headed right. Not sure why, but what the hell. We found three wobbegongs (carpet sharks) the biggets about 6ft and a few bits and pieces - usual suspect stuff. Leatherjackets and trigerfish, a lone nidibranch, a small cuttlefish. And, well, the dive continued in much the same vein. We turned around and headed back and past our entry to the more familiar left (or northern) side of the site and found more bits. I missed the hightlight of the dive; as I gazed at a small school of fish I don't know the name of JCJ, looking the other way, saw a school of 20 or more kingfish go past. Very impressive stuff like that; shame I didn't see it.

What else? To add to the general murkiness there was an algal bloom that added a nasty brown tinge to one part. There were a lot of estuary catfish. Sometimes you see one, today we saw 4 or five. Weird. Good sized octopus in one the concrete pipes out front. And that's about it really. A nice dive. Nice, not great, not bad.