Calendars 2016

 Cave diving, Ocean diving, Other  1 Response »
Oct 202015
 
Calendars 2016

It’s that time of year again, with Christmas creeping up on us and the pages of last year’s calendar starting to run out. Calendars f0r 2016 are now on sale. As with previous years I am doing a cave calendar and an ocean calendar. The caves version includes some stunning dry cave shots as well as the underwater stuff. And my ocean diving in the last 12 months reflects more on colourful temperate sponges and some rusty wrecks than the tropical critters of the previous version (though I did manage to squeeze one turtle in there). The full set of photos in each calendar is below. The photo pages are A4 (approx 12″ x 8″) with the dates grid below. [read more…]

Sponges on Lonsdale Wall

 Ocean diving, Reef diving  No Responses »
Oct 132015
 
Sponges on Lonsdale Wall

About the site I love Lonsdale Wall. It’s my favourite dive site in Melbourne – better than the scuttled wrecks, better than the really-hard-to-get-on reefs. Even in terrible conditions it’s usually not bad and on a good day it’s stunning. With good vis you can hang over the edge of the wall and look down into deep blue water below. If there’s a little bit of tide still running you can drift slowly along beside the yellow zooanthids and orange sponges, watching fish follow you curiously. In short, it’s nice. About the dive Sunday’s dive was the afternoon slack at the end of the flood tide. With good vis outside that morning I was looking forward to blue water and [read more…]

Cave Diving Kupang, Timor

 Cave diving, Overseas  No Responses »
Oct 042015
 
Cave Diving Kupang, Timor

Timor! I have just finished my third annual trip to the karst region of West Timor. In 2013 following some of Stefan Eberhard’s research, Stefan and I went for a quick reconnaissance trip. We spent a lot of time driving around and looking at dry holes in the tropical sun before finding our way into a major underwater system. On the last day we laid half a kilometre of line into massive blue tunnel with crystal clear water beckoning us on. It was enough of a high that organisation for the next trip began pretty quickly. In mid 2014 myself and five others headed back to the same area for further investigations. The first dive to continue the master tunnel [read more…]