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A trip to Cape Sonnerat is never to be taken lightly it’s a deep dive in a remote location on the most south eastern tip of Schouten Island and needs pretty much everything to go right to pull it off, with the weather being the biggest factor. For this dive we had five of us in the club boat and were joined by Dave Robson and Bob Blaauw in Dave’s boat from the TSAC and John Suttil with his son James in their boat from the Uni club. Arriving at the Salt works boat ramp and getting our first look across Great Oyster Bay it was great to see conditions looked perfect out on the bay with a clear sky, calm seas and next to no swell. Gear was soon loaded, boats launched and we set a course for the cape.

Arriving at Cape Sonnerat we were greeted by a pod of dolphins and took a few moments to take in the scenic grandeur of the place. We settled into coordinating the first dive which meant divers swapping boats so all boats could be run live. Sounding around the cape the bottom quickly dropped away into 60m with a number of pinnacles rising up dramatically above the reef. The diving concentrated on the very tip of the cape. On my dive with Eric, Bob and Pax, we planned to do a bit deco and have a good explore of the area. Jumping in we found ourselves descending down into a narrow ravine, which just kept going down and down, we finally reached the bottom in 53m where the ravine opened out, with the bottom continuing to slope away at a gentler rate. Large boulders dotted about the place where carpeted in a wide diversity of colourful invertebrate life, Eric and I stopped here and poked around for a few minutes whilst Pax continued on down where he later told us he reached a maximum depth of 63m. Here fish life was a little sparse other than the occasional butterfly perch and banded morwong, but the spectacular grandeur of the place was just amazing with towering walls heading up to the surface on both sides of us. Vis was less than expected at between 10 to 15m but this took nothing away from the dive, however later I did wonder what it must be like in 30+m vis. We headed back up the ravine to around 40m, where we made our way out across the reef face, here we came across large bommies and spires rising up dramatically, fish life was much more prolific with a large cloud of butterfly perch mixed with barber and rosy perch descending down on to us, boarfish and banded morwong patrolled the shady reef faces, with the occasional stripped trumpeter cruising by. With deco time racking up we slowly ascended up the steep reef face whilst making our way along the north side of the Cape. It was interesting to note that the kelp was relatively dominant down to around 40m on the reef face an indication of the year round good vis the area receives. Throughout the dive it was pleasing to see no evidence of urchin damage with only the occasional black urchin seen. As we made our way into the shallows to do our decompression stops we were joined by large schools of real bastard trumpeter darting in and out, many lion’s mane jellyfish with juvenile trevalla sheltering amongst their tentacles hung in the water column off the reef face. After a bit over an hour in the water we surfaced, back in the boat we compared our recollections of the dive agreeing it was one of the most dramatic dives you could do in Tassie.

For a second dive we headed to Black Patch Bay in the passage, a spot we had dived a few times during Easter camping trips back in the early 2000s, where I recalled a series of large bommies running out off the point which made for an excellent dive. This was a very interesting dive with plenty of structure to poke around including numerous swim throughs, though was disappointing to see that the urchins had created vast barren areas. A feature of this dive was the mass of fish life with large schools of butterfly perch, sweep, jackass morwong, and bastard trumpeter mixing , and was a spectacular sight being totally surrounded by these fish, I took time just to stop and watch the activity. I spent an hour poking around the reef features. I came across a narrow slit carpeted with golden zoathids which was home to four large boarfish, a feature I remembered from the dive I last did here 10 years ago.

With everyone back in the boat and time getting on we made our way back to Little Swan Port across the vast expanse of Great Oyster Bay, the wind had picked up a bit from the east making the trip a little more lumpy than our trip across in the morning. A small price to pay for the fantastic day of great diving we had all just experienced.
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By James P

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