Dive at The Leap, Kurnell, NSW on 21/2/14

Dive Details

Location

Date

21 February, 2014

Time

9:24am - 10:27am

Details

It was nice and flat straight off from The Leap before the dive. The conditions looked perfect. This was shaping up to be a great dive.

We jumped in and when we were all ready, we descended and headed to the sand line. We lost the others almost immediately but George and I made it to the sand line in good time. We started heading towards The Steps and I was just ahead of George. It wasn't long before I heard George's excited voice behind me and when I turned he was pointing at a gorgeous painted angler (which we will now call "Alex"). It was quite pale in colour but very attractive.

We pushed on and at the rock behind Seahorse Rock we found the pot-bellied seahorses, "Bob" and "Rosie". We looked around for "Eddie" but couldn't find him. I started to look for "Lucy" in some of her usual haunts but George found her first, not far from where I was looking.

We continued on and we found "Southern Cross", "Pierre" and ""Richie" on their usual rock. Vicki who was just ahead or just behind us said she saw a fourth seahorse there so I will have to look more carefully the next time. I did manage to find the resident small cuttlefish.

We next stopped at Big Rock and had a quick look for pygmy pipehorses but found none. We stayed on top of the reef and swam to where we'd seen the Miamira magnifica nudibranchs. We managed to find one but couldn't find the other.

We headed back towards the sand line and swam past the basket star before swimming over the sponge covered boulders looking for anglers.

We did our safety stop near the Plesiastrea colonies. I thought it would be a good idea to practice my SMB deployment technique. I put a little air into the SMB and when to let out the reel when the whole thing slipped out of my fingers and shot to the surface. It was that clear I could watch it for a while. However, I could see it was floating away so I cut the stop short to 3 minutes and retrieved it. Looks like more practice is needed - holding a camera doesn't help. We exited at The Steps.

Buddy

Geroge Borovskis

Seas

Slight

Visibility

10-15 metres

Duration

63 minutes

Maximum depth

21.3 m

Average depth

13.8 m

Water temperature

16.9°C

Dive Profile from Citizen Hyper Aqualand

Tides at Botany Bay AEDT

Note that tides at dive site may vary from above location.

High

1:06am

1.50m

Low

7:22am

0.54m

High

1:20pm

1.36m

Low

7:26pm

0.50m

Camera gear

Camera

Nikon D7000

Lens

Nikon AF Micro-Nikkor 60mm f/2.8D

Housing

Ikelite 6801.70

Lens port

Ikelite Flat Port 5502.41

Strobe

2 x Ikelite SubStrobe DS161

Photographs

Depth information, where present, indicates the depth of the camera when the photograph was taken and can be used to approximate the depth of the subject.