Latest Dive Reviews

"Low Head-23 26 January 2016

For an extended Australia Day long weekend the club headed up to Low Head for four days of diving this magnificent area. Our base for this weekend would be the historic Low Head Pilot Station complex where we were staying in the Lighthouse Keepers Cottage on top of the bluff with the Low Head light house in the back yard!! Joining us for the weekend was Andrew G, Eric F, Benita V, Mick S and family, Janine McK (with Rick), Jon B and myself.

The weekend kicked off with plans to meet at the Low Head boat ramp at 10am Saturday in preparation for a dive on the flood slack water tide at 11am. Which required an early start with myself and Mick departing Hobart at 6pm with the club boat in tow. By 10:30am preparations were being made for the first dive which was to be out to the Farewell Beacon on Middle Bank. With six of us on the dive and Rick running the boat allowed us all to get a dive on the beacon in slack water, for two (Janine and Benita) it would be their first dive on the Farewell Beacon, whilst for the remainder of us other than probably Jon it had been a bit too long between drinks since we had last dived this area. We all had a magnificent dive on the reef that drops off spectacularly on the western side of the beacon into the shipping channel in 50 plus metres of water, with the reef carpeted in rich diversity of colourful invertebrate species. On the way down some old beacon structure can be examined in around 20m which attracts a bit of fish activity. Jon and I dropped down to around 40m and swam north racking up a bit of deco along the way, vis was good at around 20m and the water temperature a balmy 19-20 degrees. Making our way back up the reef we had a stop to poke around another bit of old beacon structure in 30m which is more north of the Farwell Beacon. A part I always enjoy about this dive is coming back up to the Farwell Beacon in 10m where any deco can be completed poking around the dense kelp forest next to the beacon and amongst the frenetic fish activity under the beacon, which usually consists of many zebra fish, wrasse, sweep, large bastard trumpeter and marble fish darting around along with pairs of oldwives, boarfish, horse shoe leather jackets to name a few. On this occasion I spotted a sole moonlighter fish a species I had not seen in Tassie before and looked like it belonged in a more tropical climate with its black, yellow and silver stripes. I subsequently logged this sighting with a photo on RedMap (see http://www.redmap.org.au/region/tas/sightings/2124/ ).

Other dives we did during our Low Head stay was the Fish Beacon marking Barrel Rock, off the end of the Low Head break wall, which like Middle Bank drops from very shallow to over 50 plus metres down a steep slope. We did this usually as a low tide dive later in the afternoon, though visibility is reduced on the low tide we found it to be around 10m which was perfectly acceptable. We also did the Fish Beacon as a shore dive on flood slack tide on the Monday, this allowed all of us to get in the water for cracking great dive where Eric, Andrew and I made our way down to 50m to explore the deeper reef edge. Here we had a large school of silver trevally circle around us for a bit and a school of around a dozen boarfish swim by which was a little unusual as they are usually associated with a specific reef structure. We would like to have headed further afield to West Head, Hebe Reef or Tenth Island after the high tide dives but the wind would often pick up in the afternoon creating rather lumpy conditions beyond the heads.

We also did a couple of drift dives one which saw Eric and I jump in on the Farwell Beacon and surfaced well past the Fish Beacon after being underwater for 75 minutes and drifting nearly 2Km. It was just spectacular drifting along face of the Middle Bank wall in 30m, this then gives way to a more low profile patchy reef and eventually sand before arriving at the Barrel Rock reef off the Fish Beacon. For much of the dive the drift was very gentle, but for a good portion of the dive we found we had to fin against the current to make progress down the channel, then as we passed the Barrel Rock reef the current picked up to be very strong and was forcing us up the slope, a good time to surface!!

For me a highlight of the weekend was a dive that Jon, Eric and I did where we crossed the bottom of the shipping channel. This involved jumping in on the Farewell Beacon descending down the steep reef face to 55m then crossing the flat channel bottom heading due south and then ascending up the western side of the channel. I particularly like this dive as you get to dive both sides of the channel on the one dive. We were well prepared for the depth using rebreathers and trimix diluent, giving a shallow air equivalent depth with little or no narcosis. A video of the dive can be viewed on YouTube at https://youtu.be/yBYYhWaZ1vw

Staying at the Light House Cottage was just spectacular with magnificent views out over Bass Strait, though these were hampered at times by smoke from the NW fires. At night the light house flashed away performing its duty whilst penguins could be heard later in the evening.

Tuesday we headed home after a drift dive in the morning on the flood tide which ended a highly successful Low Head weekend, hopefully it won’t be so long this time before we make it up there again for a club trip.
"
By

Who Dived it?