A relaxed dive to finish the trip, guided by Alexa, one of the ProDive instructors on the boat. We spotted a turtle on the surface as soon as we entered. It stayed on the surface for a little while and then swam down to the bottom to graze. I didn't manage to capture all of this dive, as the battery I was using in the camera wasn't fully charged, and I missed filming a couple of the largest schools of fish we saw over the three days on the reef.
We started the dive just after dawn, and headed off to the Little Tracy bommie. Along the way we saw another Moray Eel, some Unicornfish, and several Bumpheaded Parrotfish.
We dove down onto the sandy areas of the Tennis Court, and then back to the drop-off. We swam along the drop-off until we reached the large bommie, worked our way around it, and then swam back to the boat through the shallower waters. An amazing amount of life!
Great dive with a wide variety of species, including a shark! Quite a strong current between some of the bommies.
An easy dive to start the day! We saw a Stingray feeding by disturbing the sand to find it's prey, some Flowery Cod, Anemone fish, and several cleaning stations in action. We also saw a good-sized Moray Eel hiding in the coral.
This was the second dive with Kirsty on this trip to the GBR. The Mushroom is a very obvious coral structure. The rough waves breaking over the reef made the water fairly cloudy in spots, but it was still a great dive. Saw my first Unicornfish!
This was the second dive for the day, but the first with my camera. Four of us swam around the right and side of Petaj. While we were protected by the reef, the surface was still quite choppy, and the visibility reflected this.
The water temperature is dropping in the bay now. It was 13 degrees in the water for this dive on 25 May. Not a lot of life around, and the water was remarkably cloudy considering that it had been quite calm for a few days before the dive. It's been a couple of months since my last dive here, and I was surprised at how much the landscape had changed. Lots of new marine growth, and parts of many of the ledges had collapsed. It made it hard to get my bearings!
There were lots of divers getting ready to go in when we arrived, so we decided to enter the water from the beach, and to head out to the wreck of the Eivion first. When we did get to the pier there were actually very few divers around, so we assume that they must have gone out to Elsa's reef. Visibility was pretty good, although slightly milky. Not as much variety of life as we have seen there before. We had been told that there was a large Smooth Ray hanging around the pier, but we didn't see it.
This was another murky dive! Pretty poor visibility, and not anywhere as much life around as we would normally see. Things improved a bit towards the end of the dive, but certainly not the best dive we've ever had at Ricketts Point...
This was quite a murky dive, with visibility getting worse the further we got away from the shore. There were lots of Snapper, some Leatherjackets, one school of Zebrafish, and a few large Leatherjackets and Fiddler Rays. We also saw a few Old Wives, Moonlighters, and a large Wrasse.
This was the first dive of the year for us, and the highlight was the variety of life around Ricketts Point's Fish Bowl.