Dive 2000 Dive Club - Sydney :: Jervis Bay Marine Life Smorgasbord for Australia Day by Kevin Deacon

Six times a year Dive 2000 club members and new clients gravitate to Jervis Bay and sail off aboard MV OceanTrek. We have been doing this for 10 years now and it’s so good that Cherie and I try never to miss a single weekend. Every now and then we get the opportunity to take our group on an extended long weekend, Australia Day this year provided the perfect opportunity and we have just returned utterly inspired by the great diving Jervis Bay provided.

A popular event on the weekend is a slide show revealing all the amazing animals that can be encountered in Jervis bay and of course I point out that it can take many visits to see them all and I have compiled this impressive set of images over many visits. The regulars watching my presentation still take a keen interest because I often have a new animal or two to show. The subjects revealed include many very special species such as red Indian fish, grey nurse sharks, giant cuttles, port Jackson Sharks, weedy sea dragons, sea horses and a great variety of unique fish species.

Would you believe that this weekend our divers encountered everything in the slide show underwater on the one weekend? Well it happened! We also got to explore all the best sites on the north side of the bay including the sea caves and encountered some very clear water at some locations. We dived some new dive sites that featured a whole tribe of red Indian fish and not only that but some of our divers showed me my first pygmy seahorse, a species I have been waiting to find and photograph for several years, (thank you Helen Stollery, Vivienne Hervey & Belinda).

Unfortunately I had run out of film shooting the red Indian fish, this doesn’t happen to digital shooters, so, today I rang Nikon and ordered a Nikon D200 Digital SLR and the biggest image capture card I can stuff into it!. This decision was also inspired by doing a dive with Richard Arnolds digital Nikon SLR and I had so much fun with it that I was reluctant to give it back, the OceanTrek crew have renamed me Digital Deacon.

Be careful what you try, it could be addictive!

Our dive master David Young even found his own Red Indian fish so he has no excuse for swimming past them on our Saturday Morning Dive Club shore dives at Bare Island anymore!

And then there was the fancy dress party on Saturday night, men in masks, women in feathers, much drinking and dancing. Some of the ladies taught us a whole new game involving clothes pegs; you can’t believe what some of these girls can do with pegs!

I am sure the party pictures will turn up on our site eventually!