Dive - Saturday Feb 27, 2010

On Saturday morning I once again made my way to the club house for the Adelaide University Scuba Club and waited for Dave to show up.  The club dive had been canceled due to a strong wind forecast, but we were heading off with two tanks for some hopefully less wind tossed water.

Our first stop, after two hours of driving through wine and olive country, was the Rapid Bay Jetty.  An abandoned granite factory sat high on the hill, having previously loaded cargo ships on the original jetty.  Now a fancy new jetty had been build along side with a set of stairs for divers to access the water and swim to the older jetty whose pilings were full of life after having been there for so many years.  We got in and followed the markers on the seabed straight to the pilings.  There fish teamed about and colorful invertebrates spread out before my eyes.  And so did the fog.  For about an hour, I flooded my mask every minute to get rid of the fog.  In between floodings, we swam out to sea between the pilings.  Dave had his camera and progress was sometimes quite slow.  As I waited, flooding my mask I poked around.  At one time as I cleared my mask this large face stared back at me.  A cuttlefish who was probably the close relative of Davy Jones stared at me.  I failed to clear my mask under the pressure of his gaze.  We continued on, getting to the T of the jetty where a few large schools of fish had gathered.  Dave chased around a puffer fish for a while, his spines clearly visible although it turns out that we weren't annoying enough to invoke any reaction.  We came to the surface at the end of the jetty for a while, so that Dave could be come less disorientated and I finally got to fix my mask.  We searched the pilings a while longer for leafy sea dragons, but only found a few crabs, another cuttlefish and all the reef fish we had previously seen. 

After getting out with less than 250 psi in my tank, we loaded up and drove a short ways to Second Valley.  The plan was to do a short dive here and then head farther back north to find the Star of Greece wreck.  We put in and swam around the point and into a cove.  Marine life was much scarcer than the jetty but the dive was more like a Jamestown dive of rocks and plant life.  Dave found a blue devil in a hole and took some pictures.  At about half our tanks down, we got out and headed to the Star of Greece.

The Star of Greece is supposed to be an iron, three masted ship that broke up of the beach south of what is now South Australia's first official unclad beach.  We put in off a beach farther south where the girl at the cafe by the same name tried to give us directions to the wreck.  They were quite vague and the water quite a hike from the car.  We debated long and hard whether we actually wanted to do this dive.  Eventually we got in the water and decided to snorkel around separately looking for the wreck.  In the end, we never found it and we did a short underwater swim that barely tripped my computer's depth indicator.  Getting out of the water we did see a fair sized ray of some sort but we made the trek back to the car and swore to never come back to Star of Greece.

Dive Stats:
Rapid Bay
Depth:  30ft
Dive Length: 104 minutes
Bottom Temperature: 69 deg

Second Valley
Depth:  27ft
Dive Length:  37 minutes
Bottom Temperature:  74 deg