Blairgowrie Marina - 18:53pm Sunday the 4th of July 2010
Temp: 10'C
Vis: 10m
Wind: None
Divers: Ben & Jason

Whilst suiting up in the car park we were surprised to see another group of divers arriving for what we had anticipated to be a pretty decent night dive. Our plan called for entry on the end of the flood in order to get the best vis.

Walking along the pier to our entry point we could see no evidence of a current running in either direction. The water was almost perfectly still as there was no wind to stir things up.

After a couple of last minute buddy checks we took our giant strides of the lower platform half way along the Eastern side of the pier. Immediately descending into about 3m of water, the canister light I had brought along for the occasion gave us a decent field of view in reasonably clear water. The light also did a very good job of attracting thousands of bait fish that swarmed around us like angry bees.

There appeared to be a strong ebb flow which surprised us as we had expected either flood or slack water.

As we made our way to the Northern end of the pier and the wave wall, we did not see as many vertebrates as expected, although a brief encounter with a short headed eel worm was an early highlight. Moving further out to sea past pylon after pylon covered with an abundance of invertebrate growth we photographed a number of red bait crabs, red handed shrimp, fan worms, seahorses, sponges and the occasional fish.

Further out along the wave wall we came across various leatherjackets making decent additions to our ever growing photographic library. At the very western tip of the wave wall, where we had the deepest reading on our dive computers (6.6M), we had the chance to capture some shots of a good sized zebra fish as well as more leatherjackets further out in the weed beds.

At the one hour mark the battery on our canister light gave out and I had to switch to my backup torch. This signaled the time to turn around and head back for the ladder. Given the meager light beam thrown out by my backup we did not see a lot on our return journey, although we did stop to take shots of the largest leatherjacket for the night.

Returning to our entry point just as the other group were getting in we hauled ourselves out ending another 80 minutes underwater. Having dived this site a number of times during the day, there were not a lot of surprised to be had during this particular night dive. We put this down to the time of year as the bay is now getting quite cold most of the motile life has moved into the warmer waters outside the heads.