Sunday was a looking to be an awful day weather-wise with strong winds and an increasing swell forecast, but at 8am the sea actually looked okay enough to take ‘Nitrox’ (Ian Swan’s excellent dive boat) out for a spin. Onboard was Irene (my gorgeous wife), Ian Swan (Nitrox's skipper), Shaun Rohloff (an all-round good bloke), and myself.
We headed out of Port Taranaki to Saddleback Island at the back of the Nga Motu Marine Park. Ian and Shaun jumped into the water for a dive on a kelp covered boulder slope going to a maximum depth of 27m. The water was 16C and the visibility was a bit poor giving only 4m on the bottom, but despite this both divers remained in the water for almost an hour in their wetsuits. Ian, being a shrewd hunter located a good sized crayfish (red spiny rock lobster) and returned it to the boat at the end of the dive.
The next dive was down the coast on some new ground that we’d never dived before. Using the bottom sounder we located some interesting formations in 20-23m of water. Showing up as 5m drops with undercuts, the ground looked promising. With Nitrox at anchor, I jumped into the water and followed a shot line to the bottom. Initially, the ground looked almost average with 1-2m high lava ledges with a black sand bottom. The fish life was not very exciting either, with only the occasional wrasse coming over to me for a look. I started to swim out from the shot line when out of the 3m vis. water dark shapes stared to appear around me. I headed over to one such dark mass to discover a 4m high lava outcrop which was undercut creating a huge overhang that could be swum down. On the roof were pockets or holes full of crayfish of all sizes. I continued to swim down the undercut until I popped out at the end. Then in front of me was a large tunnel through a lava mass, so I swam down its length to the light at the back. Juvenile crayfish lined the roof and walls, larger ones were walking about on the floor totally ignoring me… this was amazing to see!!! I swam through mini archways, into little caves, and over the top of the lava structures themselves. The area it covered was huge. Delicate sponges, oblique-swimming triplefins and shoaling maomao, and even a john dory swam around with me.
Obviously this was a very important area in terms of restocking Taranaki's crayfish population. The one disappointing thing I did see was the remains of a commercial crayfish pot lying broken up in one of the cuts in the main lava formation. One can only hope that this gem of a dive site is not abused and lost to the generations of new divers that have yet to discover it.
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Whilst preparing for a deep dive with Ian Swan earlier last week, I turned up with all my gear ready to dive. After calibrating the rebreather, pulling on my drysuit, and then preparing for the pre-breathe at the dive site, I went for my fins only to discover that I'd managed to leave them at home! The moral: Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents a Piss Poor Performance. Sorry for muffing up our deep dive Ian. :o(
Here is a picture of a not so typical seahorse that I found today in only 3m of water on a dive with Julie Barr and Ian Swan in Port Taranaki. This particular seahorse had five spikes on top of its head whereas it is more usual to see seahorses in Taranaki without any spikes at all. The overall length was about 20cm long and it performed a few subtle colour changes as it posed for photos. Ian took the photo with his Olympus 5050 digital camera and underwater housing.
