Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Voodoo 12 September 2009

Voodoo is located on the south side of the Kurnell National Park at the end of Sir Joseph Banks Drive.
I completed 2 dives here on Saturday 12th September. I went with a group from Abyss dive club and our Dive Master was named 'Cem', not sure if I spelled that correctly?
We inspected the entry and exit point before our dive and found the seas quite flat. Apparently the name Voodoo was given to this location by some old surfies that said the waves here well up like some kind of magic, so it is not a dive spot that can always be accessed. Our dive master, 'Cem', told us that in his experience this site is unfit to dive 3 out of every 4 times he has been here due to the waves.
We decided that today was a good day to dive and 'Cem' briefed us on the dive and the intricacies of entry and exit. I was buddied off with one of the other 'no mates' divers and met my new buddy named Markus. Markus had a European accent something like German but I wasn't sure exactly and never asked him.

We went back to the car park to gear up and went through the necessary checks before returning to dive. It was a particularly hot day and we were overheating in our wet suits and I can remember being relieved to get in the water which was a chilly 17 degrees.

We arranged to follow 'Cem' and his buddy for the first dive as 'Cem' was very familiar with the area. Within a few minutes we came across a Port Jackson shark. OMG I thought "SHARK!" but 'Cem' got hold of it by the tail and started to stroke it like a big pussy cat. These creatures really are very placid and nothing seemed to excite them. We saw a blow fish that 'Cem' scared and it did what it is famous for, it blew up like a wedding balloon. We saw countless PJ's (Port Jackson Sharks) sitting on the floor and a few cruised around us, they are the most remarkable creature.
We found a curious blue groper and ended up at 5 m where we cruised the kelp back to the exit point while completing our safety stop. All up a most enjoyable dive.

We returned to the car park and had some lunch. We stayed out of the water for 1 hour before gearing up to return for a second dive. This time Markus and I decided to go it alone and we planned to follow the same route as the first dive. After we descended the area looked somewhat familiar and we followed a heading north before turning SW. We didn't find as many exciting things on our own and got down to 19.5M. I signaled to Markus that we should ascend as we had obviously gone to far out and were dropping off the reef. We climbed back into the reef and found a few PJ's and a very nice cuttlefish. We did our 5M safety stop but we had become disorientated. We surfaced about 250M away from the exit and had a nice relaxing snorkel back to the exit.

All up a great days diving and some lessons learned about navigation (or lack of ability with such).

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