Good Vibrations

I haven't managed to get as much diving as I'd liked to do this summer, but the dives I have been on were certainly memorable. The underwater scooter has been really useful and allowed me to explore vast areas of reef around the Taranaki coast.

There is a common belief that the noise of a scooter drives fish and other marine animals away from the diver, but to the contrary I've found it to be the complete opposite. While I was scootering over a magnificent reef in South Taranaki, I flew over a group of large boulders and at first appearance there was no life around them. Just the unusual shapes of the boulders got my attention, so I started to do tight circles and figures of eights over them as I studied the formations. Within no time at all I started to spot movement from under the boulders. A moving mass of large crayfish (red spiny lobsters) started to crawl out of their hiding holes. Reef dwelling fish like red moki, mao mao, and various wrasse also just appeared as if from nowhere. Wow! I even had a couple of fly-bys from some stingrays.

I'm not sure if the marine creatures were just being incredibly inquisitive about the noise and vibrations from the scooter, but it does go a long way to dispelling the myth of scootering about and never getting to see the sea life.

Deep Blue

A wee while ago I headed North for three days and drove the 500km (310miles) to the small East coast village of Tutukaka for some diving out at the Poor Knights Islands.

On the way up, Ian Swan, his trusty camera, and myself, all jumped into the warm clear water at Goat Island Marine Reserve, near Leigh. Here we were molested by the gigantic shoaling snapper, mao mao, and kelp fish. We even saw a mermaid! (Ian has the photographic evidence... okay, it was actually a young lady in a skimpy bikini that had swum out to Goat Island from the mainland and passed over us while we were milling about in the shallows. A very memorable sight.)

Our dives in the Poor Knights were awesome as usual. First port of call was a dive off the back of Landing Bay Pinnacle to 60m. The visibility was amazing down there, we looked out over the downward sloping white sands that dropped off to beyond our gaze and into the ever deepening blueness of the water. As we ascended spiralling up the pinnacle to our designated decompression stops, the visibility dropped to about 20m but this was easily forgotten about as we watched vast swathes of fish moving about following the tidal driven plankton masses.


The second dive of the day was at Middle Arch. On the bottom of the lava slope at 30m in some broken reef, a mosaic moray lay still apart from the gentle bobbing of its head. It watched patiently as Ian approached. Once Ian was within a few centimetres of moray’s gaping mouth, it obliged with graceful posturing as the camera snapped pictures of the transparent but deadly sharp teeth that mosaic morays' have. Once the photo shoot finished, Ian and myself found ourselves heading up the slope and into the archway. Here we had the honour of being joined by a large sunfish (mola mola), but as usual I was not paying any attention so was not until I got back to the boat I first heard about it (I was the only person not to see the beast and I had to endure a ribbing from our skipper, Noel, about not being very observant!) I did however manage to have a couple of juvenile eagle rays to do a fly past right next to my head, but Ian just missed catching a photo of it.

The next day, we stopped off at Landing Bay Pinnacle again and planned a dive into the Taravana Cave system that went deep into the interior of Tawhiti Rahi Island (Taravana I'm told means crazy). The swim to the entrance took us down the western flank of the pinnacle and then over to the mouth of the cave which bottoms out at 36m. Ian was on open circuit (OC) and had twinned cylinders, but it was very critical that we stayed within the gas supplies available to us for the duration of the dive and decompression (plus reserves). As per the plan, we headed deep into the blackness of the cave. Our lights highlighted the abundant life on the cave walls and the gorgonian fans on the ceiling. The 250m penetration to the back of the cave went very quickly. Here Ian took photos as I posed with a small statue for the camera. We made our way back to a point where a narrower passageway breaks from the main cave and we followed it to the second of the Taravana Cave's entrances. The blue light was flooding in the entrance and in no time we were doing decompression stops on the colourful walls above the main entrance. Ian seized the opportunity to capture some more pictures while we hung around on deco.


To finish off the day's diving, Noel took us to Cleanerfish Bay. There was everything from stingrays to large crayfish hidden in the kelp covered boulders that went to 23m. I got to hold Ian’s new HID dive light while he took pictures of a Gem Nudibranch that was happy to pose for him.

The only bummer of the trip were the bloody mosquitoes that effected a perfectly executed midnight break-in into our accommodation and devoured copious quantities of our blood while we tried to sleep... “buzzzzz!”