Sponges at Bateman's Bay

The water at Bateman's Bay was freezing cold last week, being only 13 degrees above freezing.  This is one degree above my coldest dive ever.

I'm trying a different camera rig at the moment, replacing a camera flash with a video light.  I'm trying this because I'm tired of processing photos at home to find that the flash has overexposed the photo, even though I've got the flash power at minimum.  It seems that the flash on the Canon G15 is just too powerful for close-up or macro shots.

This time I attached a fabulous little QUDOS underwater video light.  It is designed to attach to Go Pro cameras, but it was pretty simple to configure a rig that would attach to my Canon underwater housing.  It is designed to go down to 40m underwater.  It puts out 400 lumens that is more than adequate for the type of close-up photography that I need a light for.

 

The light has 3 modes from spot to wide-angle, with high and low power on each.

I left the camera in Program mode, but unfortunately the Canon gives preference to Aperture, which means that most of the time it was using f1.8 with a shutter speed of 1/30sec to 1/60sec which is too slow for somebody floating around in the underwater surge.  As a result, most of the photos were slightly blurred.   Next time I'll set a shutter speed of about 1/125 or above.  Regrettably the Canon underwater housing doesn't give you access to the dial that changes the shutter speed, so I'll have to set this before mounting the camera in the housing.

Here are the best pictures of the day: a sample of soft sponges.

A Day at the Coast

This weekend I had another leave-pass to go down to the coast to do some diving.  I stayed overnight at Bateman's Bay afterwoods because leaving at 5am start to get down there by 7:30am and then having several dives makes me really tired sometimes and it's not worth the risk of driving home on the same day.

Instead of a normal dive, we went on exploration dives to areas that haven't been dived before.    The thing about diving is that you don't travel far under the water and you can't see things until you get right up close to them.  So until you get down to the bottom you don't know what you'll find.

Colourful sponges

A moray eel peeking out

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 A wobbegong shark having a rest on a rock ledge.  This is probably the largest one I've ever seen - maybe 2.5m long.

A boarfish

 Part of a shipwreck I found.  This piece of timber was sticking out of the sand an covered with crustaceans.  I cleared some of the sand away and took this photo.  My dive buddy had swum away and after I found him again I couldn't find the wreck.

I went for a drive down to Malua Bay.  The beach was pretty deserted except for one surfer and some folks with metal detectors looking for loose change, I presume.

Down the coast again, and again

I've been down to the south coast for 3 weekends in a row.  Twice to go diving with Matt, and once to go to the Moruya races with Karyn.  And then last weekend we went up to Sydney to go to the races at Warwick Farm.  I'm actually glad to have this weekend off.

Here are a few photos from the various weekends.

 Stake Knife running 3rd at Moruya.

 The jockey (Kayla Nisbet) was pleased with the result. Despite coming back with a face covered in mud. She seems to be always smiling.

 We stayed overnight at a place in Bateman's Bay overlooking the water.

 Our room.

 Having a glass of champagne and enjoying the view.

 The view from the room looking out to the East.

 I went for a walk after dinner and captured this view of the bridge over the Clyde river.  The section in the middle lifts up to let sailboats through.

 A moray eel that Matt and I saw on a dive at Broulee.

 Some colourful sponges.

 A large blue grouper that kept his eye on us.

 This is the beach at Broulee where we went diving.  There was a very strong rip just off the rocks that quickly sucked us out into the deeper water.  Just as we were getting dragged out in the strong current I remembered that I hadn't locked the car doors.

 Karyn and I on a bus trip to Warwick Farm with the Women In Racing crowd.  I reckon Karyn had a champagne glass glued onto her hand for the whole trip.

 We were invited by the racecourse manager to view the start of a race from the starter's position.  The next three show the horses jumping from the barriers.

Father's Day - underwater

This weekend Matt and I went on a father-son diving weekend down to Bateman's Bay to celebrate Father's Day.

We drove down on Saturday afternoon, and had a couple of dives planned for Sunday.  It was a good drive, and when we checked into the motel they upgraded us to a better room - so we felt it was going to be a great weekend.

The wind was starting to pick up when the boat left the Bay, and they had to change the dive destination because of the big swell to a more sheltered spot off a place called Black Rock - a small volcanic outcrop about 20 minutes out to sea.

It was chance for Matt to practice his photography as well.

Once we were underwater it was a lot more peaceful that on the surface.  There are a lot of things to see such as the plants below.  And even the acid-yellow coral growing on the rock.

We were also surrounded by big blue groupers.  They weren't the slightest bit worried about us - they were only curious and would come right up to you.  Sometimes it was downright scary to look to one side and suddenly see one of the just floating next to you.

As you can probably see, under the water everything looks a blue/green/grey colour.  This is because the water absorbs the red component of the light.  The following 2 photos show you the difference when you use a flash.  Because there is no red in the light spectrum under the water, a lot of creatures use red to camouflage themselves.

 No flash

Flash











Here are some other underwater flora and fauna.  Fabulous colours as you can see.

Here is an interesting looking fellow.  I thought he was going to attack me for a minute.

All too soon our dives were over, so it was time to drift up to the surface..