Bloody Great Sharks!!! (Aussie Accent)

I knew this dive was gonna be good. Big sharks + Andy and Sam = Knee wobbling Excitement. It's a simple equation and only one thing could stop it working out....the weather, but we were due a change in fortunes after our last dive and the weather turned good :) Fun and Sunshine, there's enough for everyone. I'm quoting classic stuff here.
South West Rocks then was our destination, about an hour south of Coffs Harbour, kind of halfway between Brisbane and Sydney. We'd heard via the great Galah Jason and a diving magazine of a dive site where you could get up close and personal with some Grey Nurse sharks. Being nurses, how could we resist? These sharks are big docile creatures, but with big sharky teeth which makes them look a bit fierce, a bit like a scary looking sheep really. We chose a dive company called South West Rocks Dive Centre which is a family owned affair and who turned out to be the polar opposite of the last bunch, who were a bunch of ******s to be honest. John and Murray were our hosts for the day and what a nice pair they were. We both took an instant liking to them, immediately trustworthy, jokey, laidback proper Aussie blokes. After sorting out our kit at the shop, which was in great condition this time, we jumped on their small boat and headed down the river and out onto the sea. First we had to get the boat over the breaking waves which basically entailed going straight into them leaving us completely drenched, luckily we were in our wetsuits and so the experience was akin to the Wet and Wild theme park :) Half an hour later we were anchored off the South West Rocks, two small outcrops just off the coast. We struggled into our gear and back-rolled off the boat into the blue. As always Sam took forever to get herself down to meet the rest of us and then we started swimming to our destination, a trench formed by the rock at a depth of 25 meters. Peering over the edge and looking into the trench 3-4 meters below us, 8-10 very cool, Grey Nurse sharks were slowly cruising up and down. The biggest of them was maybe 8-9 ft long, a healthy size! After watching them for a couple of minutes, we floated down to the bottom of the trench, the floor of which was filled with crushed shells and lay down. We then spent pretty much the rest of the dive just lying there and watching the sharks swimming past us at no more than 1-2 meters away at times.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, life just doesn't get better than that! We didn't feel any fear whatsoever, knowing that they're not interested in us as dinner certainly helped. Here is a film I took which starts with Sam signing to me 'how much air have you got left?' and me ignoring her :) and panning round to see a shark swimming towards us, my best film yet! It was definitely one of my best dives, but I was glad to get back on the boat, it was freezing, 18 degrees Celsius underwater in Australia!

We spent an hour inbetween the dives drinking soup and eating lollies, which in Oz are sweets not lollipops (weirdo's) and getting called 'whinging poms' cause we said it was cold :) All good banter and helped take my mind off the gently rocking boat. Grabbing our kit on again we plunged back into the cold waters for our second dive and headed down to 14 meters to have a look at the cave that this dive site is well known for. The cave runs all the way under the rocks over a distance of about 100 meters or so. We chickened out of going through the whole length as its pitch black, you need a torch and its quite narrow in places and leaning towards claustrophobia, it wasn't an experience I was eager to have a go at. If you were going to swim through the cave normally, you dive down to about 24 meters where there is a small, dark entrance to the cave. You enter the cave and after a couple of meters you then swim up a narrow chimney for about 4 meters, before swimming down the rest of the cave which leads you to the exit at about 14 meters depth. All this in the dark and in single file, with no possibility of turning round whilst you're in the cave. Apparently there's a really big Stingray in there and also lots of lobsters, which would have been cool to see. Instead what we did, was to swim to the caves exit, which is big, room enough for 4 divers or so to swim in and whilst the other divers went further into the cave, we hung out just inside the exit. Going into the cave about 3-4 meters there was a big Bull Ray lying on the floor (the type that did for Steve Irwin), not the really big one further into the cave, but still a decent size, maybe 4ft diameter. The cave was full to bursting with literally thousands of small fish called bullseyes. It was amazing swimming through them and then looking at them against the light shining down from the surface. Amongst the rocks on the floor of the cave, I discovered some Mooray Eels, very inquisitive little fellas, very interested in my camera. A very nice Lionfish was also swimming about and some nice red Squirrelfish were lounging about on the rocks outside the cave. We spent most of the dive in the cave, when the other divers returned we swam back underneath the boat, where I surfaced immediately as I was freezing and Sam swam on for another 10 minutes with John and saw another couple of sharks, the lucky girl.
The ride home on the boat was a bit of a mare, really choppy sea and I came within about a second of being sick, Sam was fine of course. All in all, one of the best dives we've done and goes to show how much a good dive crew can make the experience even better.

Next up: Melbourne



Listening to: Bjork - Debut






Currently Reading: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer