Hopefully you’ll find this offering a refreshing change. It’s mostly factual as I feel that the subject matter deserves a little respect.
It’s 06:05 on Thursday 15th November & I’m standing alone at the waters edge of Baby beach. I’ve been getting a little restless lately having spent the last ten days driving & diving up & down the road along the west coast & it’s all started to feel a little repetitive. I feel sorely in need of some variety & the east side is looking more & more inviting as the days pass. Since my 05:00 alarm call to dive with Tim a few days earlier I’ve been waking at the same time, which is about when I normally rise at home. Walt reckoned that we should have been on island a couple of weeks earlier when the wind had dropped right out & diving this site was an easy proposition. He gave me a glimmer of hope by adding that sometimes the breakers here are smaller at dawn before the daily prevalent easterly blow gets into it’s stride.
So I’d left the others sleeping & crept out of the bungalow just before dawn. I even managed to start the car without the alarm sounding, which was a first.
It didn’t look good. There was very little wind but the still sizeable waves were rolling in. With no previous experience of the site it was impossible to tell the depth of water at the point where most of them were breaking (which was around 30 or 40 yards out). Or what the sea bed consisted of beneath them. Walt & Jason had assured me previously that the bottom was smooth & once in the rough stuff on the way out, a few good fin kicks should propel me to the calmer seas beyond. Despite those words of comfort it still looked a little intimidating & I found myself remembering the two previous attempts I’d made on earlier visits to the island. Both of them had ended in failure because I’d “chickened out” as soon as I’d reached the breakers. It wasn’t so much that I was struggling but simply a fear of the unknown perils that might lie ahead. So each time I’d crept ashamedly ashore again with a full tank on my back & my tail firmly between my legs.
Don’t worry I wasn’t planning to do the dive alone today. This was simply a reconnaissance mission & I was soon reporting back to the others my findings over breakfast. Only Chris was definitely in favour of giving it a try at dawn the next morning. From the others there was a mixture of apathy & worries about losing much needed beauty sleep.
So…it was to be just the two of us then.
The day passed uneventfully, following the usual pattern of drive, dive, eat, drink, drive, dive, etc. That evening Chris & I prepared our kit to save ourselves a few minutes in the morning & limited ourselves to just a couple of bottles of Amstell (oh alright then, I did promise to make this factual didn’t I? It was four bottles).
We woke at five the next morning to find Wayne busying himself with getting his kit on the truck. As always, terrified of missing some action, he’d decided to join us.
Thirty minutes later we parked the truck on the roadside, directly in line with a large washed up tree trunk, which marks the best point of entry. Parking in this spot would enable us to check if the current was taking us in either direction as we swam out on the surface & that on the way back in we were returning to the correct spot, by keeping the two items in line with each other.
Whether there would be any current & which way it would take us was a major consideration & we agreed that if it was too strong to fin against we would abort the dive, being concerned that exiting anywhere else along the shoreline might be too dangerous.
We kitted up silently & after one last repetition of our dive plan entered the water at 06:30.
 
It was further to the breaking waves than it appeared from the shore & I guess that we were 100yards out before they became troublesome & even now we were only in about four or five feet of water. We put our regs in & still finning on our backs, with hearts thumping fit to burst, began kicking as though our lives depended on it. After a minute or so we were though the surf zone & although there were two or three foot high waves surrounding us, it was easy to ride with them. We looked back towards the car, which by now looked to be at least three hundred yards away & it was a great relief to find that we were still in line with it & the tree trunk meaning that the current was almost negligible. Looking down, the seabed was still only a maximum of fifteen feet below us. We had a hasty discussion about whether to go down now or swim out on the surface until we had at least a little greater depth beneath us. Chris had somehow managed to devour quarter of his tank already & what we could see below looked a little boring with no sign of coral or fish life, so we decided to swim on for a little longer. Being the oldest & by far the least fit, I soon began complaining about feeling tired & told them that I was going down as I hadn’t touched my air yet & would swim below them, keeping them in sight until they decided to descend. We agreed. On the bottom & now in about twenty feet I find myself surrounded by an enormous carpet of curly sea grass. I can see the edge of the reef dropping off at the limit of my visibility, which I guess was about eighty feet. This having improved dramatically from being almost nil in the sand swept shallows. Suddenly I’m face to face with a fair sized octopus.
  
Now despite having four hundred dives under his belt Chris has never seen one, so straight away the dive plan goes out of the window! I surface & drag them both down. Chris runs off his entire roll of film on the poor besieged critter before giving me a satisfied OK sign. We swim on to the reef wall which is sparsely populated with large fan corals all waving lazily to & fro in the surge which is affecting us even this far out from land. The most noticeable fish are large solitary Barracuda. We see upwards of ten of them during the dive & each one is over three feet long. A shoal of about twenty large midnight parrot fish are grazing in the seagrass at the margins of the reef. The reef itself is relatively small & peters out at eighty feet or so giving way to a never ending desert of white sand disappearing into the distance ahead of us. We decide to split up. I opt to stay on the reef & run off some video footage. The other two head off into the blue in search of bigger things.
  
Ten minutes later they are both back with me & looking pleased with themselves. Wayne holds his outstretched hand over his head indicating that they’d seen a shark (it turned out to be a black tip), while Chris drags a similarly shaped hand across his windpipe & points sadly to his camera, which of course had been no use to him after his frenzied session with the octopus. We checked gauges & as Chris was now down to seventy bar (about 1000psi in your silly units I think?) decided to head back. It was an uneventful return & much easier than the journey out. We stuck close to the seabed until we were through the breaking waves & then body surfed until it got too shallow to go any further.
Back at the truck we were all agreed….It had been by far the best dive of the trip, so far!
Would we be able to tempt the others to do it with us again tomorrow? |
By Andy Keely on Friday, December 14, 2001 - 3:20 am: 
