Oak Park 13 Feb 2010

My buddy was Keith and the Dive master was George. There was a surf competition on when we arrived and the inclement weather had driven all the sunbathers away. There was quite a big swell and high tide was about 2 hours before we dived so we encountered quite a bit of surge and current on the way back in.

 

Keith with  the very friendly blue groper. Ignore the date, I forgot to reset it when putting the batteries in the camera!

We went out to the cave and had not reached our turn around air so we went over the reef to see if we could find "fish soup". Unfortunately we didn't find it but we did startle a few fishermen. We watched a moray eel getting pretty excited with the fishing lure.

The journey back was quite hard and I could not regulate my breathing. I started to get perceptual narrowing which I recognised and just stopped and calmed down for a second. We saw a huge wobbegong and a numb ray on the way back but I was focusing (perceptual narrowing) on my breathing. The more I thought about my breathing, the more erratic it got. I tried to slow my breathing down but got anxious and gasping. I had my regulator tuned down too low and was struggling to fight the mild current. I recognized the issue and just calmed myself down and everything was OK. I surfaced near the exit point with 50 bar in the tank,

 

Timid Moray eel

The second dive was much more relaxed, we went out to the cave and had a look for the big Wobbegong we saw earlier. We found him, schools of king-fish and a huge eagle ray. All up 2 very good dives and Mid February seems to bring in the big fish to this area.

Here is a composite video of the 2 dives today.






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