Bare Island 8th November 2009

Bare Island is famous for being the location of some of the motorcycle action shots in Mission Impossible 2, as we were told several times today. It is located on the north side of Botany Bay near the Ocean outlet.

We completed 2 dives today and our divemaster was David and my dive buddy was Keith. Unfortunately my camera ran out of batteries on the first dive so I didn't get too many shots today.

Dive 1

The visibility was quite poor and Keith and I descended to about 8M and headed 210 degrees. We looked under every crevice and found a Giant cuttlefish hiding in one of the small caves around the area.

Keith

The visibility was quite poor (about 5M max) and my pictures have got the green hue back again. Even with the red filter there is still an ugly green tinge to everything and I think it may be related to the visibility?

We found a tiny swim through but couldn't wriggle through it. I took some pictures of Keith from the other side.

Keith in the small cave

I spotted a small cuttlefish and took this video just before my batteries died.

After this we found a huge cuttlefish in a cave and fed the most friendly blue groper. He was very close and really very comfortable with divers. I stroked him several times and he thought my black torch was a sea urchin, he wanted to have a bite at it several times. Keith eventually fed him and we headed back.

Dive 2,

We decided to circumnavigate the island for our second dive. The eastern side of the island has some great sponge gardens and very nice overhangs- this place could rival the GBR if it wasn't so overcrowded with divers (wait that is the GBR!)
I'm sure we went too far south as we had a huge swim back. We found an octopus on the way and had a little play with him but he wasn't interested.
We spotted a solitary Port Jackson shark resting in a cave, then we found 3 huge Port Jacksons all laid up together. I estimate they would have been 2M long as they were very big, much bigger than the ones we have seen at Voodoo.
Keith surfaced to get a bearing and saw that we were still south of the island and had some white water between us and the island. We had a vigorous swim North and eventually saw the familiar piece of steel near the entry to the first dive. I indicated to Keith that I was down to 50 bar, we had been swimming in about 2-3M for 5-6 mins. We decided to surface and finish the last 50 m with a surface swim to the exit.


View Bare Island Botany Bay in a larger map

All up 2 very OK dives, but this place is scuba central. There would have been 30-50 scuba divers there today.

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