Pier dive in Port Taranaki

At high tide today, Ian Swan and I found ourselves looking into some of the cleanest looking water that I've ever seen inside Port Taranaki. This sort of visibility usually only ever occurs during the settled weather of summer so it came as quite a plus to have it now during our mid-winter period.

We both chose to dive in our wetsuits. I was planning to wear my drysuit but Ian called me "soft" so I pulled on my wetsuit for the dive. We entered the water next to the old boat mooring pylons on the Lee Breakwater. To my dismay, I found the water felt rather cold as it percolated through the wetsuit; it was a not so warm 12ºC!

On Thursday, Ian had found a couple of octopus and seahorses in the area of the pier legs and wanted to photograph them today with his Olympus C5050Z digital camera and underwater housing. So with this objective in mind, we descended down the short rocky slope to the sandy bottom below the pier and started our search for the creatures. The pier legs were covered in bryozoans, orange sponges, and little patches of kelp. Some small triplefins and blennies tried their best to blend in with their backgrounds by playing the game of staying completely still and hiding in plain view, whilst others didn’t seem to care and just carried on buzzing about with their daily routines.

The junk that has been lost to the sea from the moorings is something else. We found assorted bottles, wire strops, tyres, ropes, metal objects of all shapes and sizes; all completely encrusted and sporting a common patchy grey colour with only their shapes giving away their possible true identity.

The sand to the outside of the pier was peppered with large horse mussels that seemed to be feeding voraciously from their gaping shells. Other than the mussels, there was only the odd spotty and sea cucumber to be seen.

We moved from along the length of pier, going from one set of pylons to the next still searching for the octopus. Ian would check out the pier and while I looked on the rocky slope. Unfortunately, we never found the octopus, but we did find a solitary seahorse (Hippocampus abdominalis, or big-belled seahorse) clinging to the base of a stalked kelp. It was clearly quite shy as it turned its head away from the camera, so we didn’t stay long with it preferring to not stress it out.

After leaving the pier, Ian and I swam along the bottom of the rocky slope following the breakwater out to the mouth of the harbour. The boulders soon changed to large concrete blocks which made up the structure of the breakwater. These blocks were also encrusted grey but sported orange nipple sponges and yellow finger sponges. Small crayfish, transparent shrimps, and slender roughy (Optivus elongatus) peered out from the dark spaces in the concrete boulder field.

We called our dive after 73 minutes. The cold of the water had played havoc with my kidneys and I felt like my bladder was going to explode because it was so full. The climb out of the water and onto the Lee Breakwater required traversing the concrete blocks with a full set of dive gear on and our fins in our hands, so great care was needed not to fall down into any of the large gaps.

This was a good dive and really enjoyed it, especially getting to dive in such clear conditions at this time of the year. The forecast for tomorrow is a 3m swell, winds from the west and that will be the end of the diving for a wee while.