Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Cabin Fever

Winter here in New Zealand means the visibility in the ocean can vary from zero to 30m plus, and can slip from one extreme to the other in a day. Yesterday, the cabin fever reached new heights and I opted to take a dive off the coast despite the 35 knot northwester and rising swell.

With the rebreather on, I jumped into the scrotum shrinking 12C water (well it would have been scrotum shrinking, but luckily I had my toasty Fourth Element thermals on under my drysuit). After checking that the controllers were still operating, I descended to the seabed.

The 0.5m visibility water obscured almost everything. I even collided with rocks the size of a car... striking the exact same spot on my head where my surfboard clobbered me during a wipe-out the day before. Fifteen minutes passed and I was considering calling the dive, but as luck would have it, I found a patch of cleaner water with about 1m of visibility. Staying motionless, I hovered over a hole where I knew a large but friendly octopus normally resides, but it wasn’t there. Instead of the octopus in the hole, I found three seahorses huddled together at the entrance. Their tails were wrapped tightly around an old section of encrusted chain.

Because I was just staying in one place the whole time, all the local marine life was either coming over to check me out or just getting on with their busy daily routines. I spent the next 45 minutes just watching the social complexities of a 1m by 1m quadrant of reef. Word must have got out that I was there because all sorts of the harder to find species introduced themselves to me. The only thing I never saw were any red spiny lobsters, but I could hear them all around me, particularly the bucks as they clicked some kind of code at each other.

After the dive, I clambered out of my dive gear and got soaked in the process due to the horizontal rain blowing at me from all directions... but guess what, that has to be one of the best dives I had this year!

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Poor Knights and the Samba Sound - Day 2

The day kicked off for me at first light. I filled my scrubber canister with a fresh load of sorb (carbon dioxide absorbent), then assembled and calibrated my Inspo’ rebreather ready for the dives.

Rebreather divers Pete Mesley and Simon Mitchell were in Tutukaka for the Oceanz Award dinner from the previous evening and joined us on ‘Arrow’. Gareth decided that he didn’t want to dive so under the supervision of Noel, skippered the boat over to the Poor Knights. The weather was very similar to Saturday’s, with a North-westerly blowing and a messy swell brewing up. This meant that it would only be dive sites on the Southern aspects of the Poor Knights islands that would be dive-able.

We settled on the outside wall of Shaft Cave on Arorangaia Island as the first dive for the day. The entrance to Shaft Cave went from just above the surface of the sea down to a depth of 50m, with a further drop off to 87m below that. I was going to dive with Simon and pose for photographs with the sponges at the deeper depths.

The water was 21C and the visibility was easily 20m. The descent went without a hitch, briefly pausing at 25m just as a check to see that everything was functioning properly, and then on to 45m where Simon left his camera on ledge before we descended further. Following the wall down to a large ledge at 61m, I stopped and watched Simon go to around the 80m mark. A seriously cold thermocline (an often visible and abrupt temperature change in the water) occurred at this depth, so after a few minutes of looking about I ascended back to the ledge where the camera was stored, whilst still watching Simon ascending below me.

Once the camera was made ready with the strobes pulled out on their spindly stalks, we set off along the wall amongst the finger sponges. At this depth they start to increase in size considerably to the ones found in shallower waters. Photos were staged and posed for. Shoaling two-spot demoiselles were keen to get in on the photo shoot and swam about me as I gazed at sponges with my HID torch highlighting the beautiful colours and finer structures.

Using the wall as a guide we slowly ascended, incorporating our decompression stops into the slow traverse of the underwater cliff. My decompression obligation was about 20 minutes shorter than Simon’s. During the shallow stops, we found a surge free zone with overhangs that contained some very diverse ecosystems. To my dismay I came across a lot of intact but dead crabs lying about the ledges. One crab was like no other I’d ever seen before. I just hope that a virus or a toxin is not responsible for causing some of the population to expire.

We surfaced from the last stop at just under two hours from entering in the water, and swam out from the island to get picked up by the boat. This was a really enjoyable dive.

For our surface interval, we stopped off in Southern Harbour and watched the divers coming and going from all the other charter boats. The sea looked quite nasty out beyond the protection of the natural harbour, but was relatively flat within.

The next dive was at “The Rock” again, but this time it was going to be a shallow no-decompression dive. Simon waited for me as I joined him near the top of the lava knoll. Almost immediately, we were joined by a long-finned boarfish who refused to stay in one place long enough to have its photo taken. I swam away from the boarfish, but it seemed to think I was rejecting it so it made a point of swimming right up next to me while I looked out for nudibranchs and banded coral shrimps. Eventually I gave it the slip and found Simon taking photos around the corner. Huge snapper circled above us.

The water was thick with noisy open-circuit underwater photographers, so I headed for the highest point of The Rock and observed a nudibranch laying its spiral egg case. Crested blennies were everywhere and popped their inquisitive looking faces out of the holes in the rhyolite rock. Definitely the place to get a good photo of one. Simon finished taking photographs so he signalled that he was ready to surface and we were back on the boat within a few minutes.

Noel took the boat back to Tutukaka, but before we set off I cleared a space on one of the forward bunks and grabbed the chance of a sleep before my 7 hour drive back to New Plymouth in Taranaki.

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I noticed during my last dive on the Sunday that my rebreather controllers were showing that cell 3 was giving a reading about 0.1bar above the other two cells. This is usually due to moisture on the cell face. I currently have the rebreather electronics hanging up and drying out, but I’ll keep an eye on it and perform a linearity check before the next dives.