A Good Day’s Diving & a Good Night with a Good Friend – Pretty Good all Round … lol! – Day 321 – 5th December

Today we had an early start parked at the roadside in our little homemade ‘camp’, well by the side of a most residential area. So we soon found ourselves amidst lots of people all either going for a morning stroll or jogging or just letting their pooches stretch their legs, still if I lived somewhere as lovely as Fingal Bay I suppose I too would probably be up early every morning just to appreciate it, it was just that beautiful. We, along with our neighbour – at the next campervan – Elizabetta, had to soon be up and at ‘em though as we needed to be at the dive shop early for our day’s diving.

Our guide to our Dive Site!

The scuba shop, a place called ‘Feet First’ was quite cool and we got our ‘dues’ paid up, got our kit organised and then stowed away our campervan in a nearby car park. Everywhere round here seems to charge for parking, quite unlike most of the places we have been to during our travels in Oz thus far. It was a beautiful day to be out doing anything, let alone venturing out to do some diving and the boat ride out from Nelson Bay was reasonably calm too. The journey was made that much better because we had a dolphin escort as we journeyed towards our destination of Broughton Island. It started out with just a mother and her calf swimming along just by the side of the boat and then more dolphins came along to join them and they did a bit of ‘relaxing’ in the boat’s bow wave. A few of the more energetic of them even started to do a bit of jumping up out of the water around us – only the best start to a dive ever! If only one or two of them would care to join us on the dive, now that would just be perfect.

Urchin on the menu for the Grouper today!

Although the crossing had been calm enough, around the island there was quite a bit of a swell tossing our boat about. We soon enough got changed though and were soon in the water following the mooring rope down to the bottom but the effects of the swell could be felt down here too. For those readers who have not had the pleasure of diving a swell it can feel pretty much like being in the surf at the top except the whole group of you gets dragged around back and forth! Because of the swell the visibility was not exactly the greatest either, even the temperatures were more like diving back home in the UK rather than what we have started to get used to out here – brrrr! However, the dive did have some plus points too in that we managed to see some Grey Nurse Sharks and a Port Jackson shark down there and the sharks along with the visibility made the dive just that little bit edgier. Early on in the dive our Divemaster, a guy called Matt, picked up a Sea Urchin – the scourge of the Great Barrier Reef – and proceeded to split it open to feed a passing Blue Grouper and anyone else who needed a feed and who fancied a but of urchin – spikey! It was a cool dive, bordering on the cold, so when we returned back to the boat the captain and crew warmed us up with some Cuppa Soup and biscuits.

Liz and Eli keeping warm together on the boat!

As we had about an hour before we would be diving again our captain told us a bit more about the area the boat was moored in and how it also served as a Great White Shark nursery! This new and somewhat surprising and worrying information made us want to know more about the risks we were undertaking by diving here! It turned out that our captain had only ever seen a Great White once and that was from a fishing boat, so hopefully we were in very little danger. Just in case though, I vowed to stay away from people with cuts but closer to those who looked a bit slow under the waters, very gallant eh!

Cue … the cello and bit of Jaws music!

The captain sailed our craft round to another part of the island for our second dive at a place called the Looking Glass. Now this turned out to be quite a strange dive and one that you can only undertake if the conditions are right and fortunately (or unfortunately) enough for us, the conditions today were right enough. The dive takes place in the crack between two large rock masses and the tide here squeezes you back and forth through the passageway between them. The sea-floor is littered with boulders and the idea is to navigate the dive using the boulders, leap-frogging each boulder as the surge pushes you forward and then taking shelter between them on the back-surge, at least that is the theory behind negotiating this dive. So not only was it a challenging dive but it was a good dive too as we managed to see a Nurse Shark and a Moray as well as lots of little fish all huddled against the rocks moving back and forth with the water.

Liz and Eli this time underwater!

Dives complete, we ‘steamed’ back to port and ourselves – and Elizabetta – quizzed the instructors  about possible resting places for the night. So we all went off for a bit of a drive to check out the spots on offer and once parked up had bit of a bite to eat before then going back to the dive shop to cadge ourselves a free shower.

A good place to discuss our dreams especially under the Stars!

So it was that nicely showered we re-parked and then went out on, what was for us, a bit of a splurge. Eli brought along a bottle of wine and we took it for a stroll about the harbour and it was a lovely night for it, my good self, my wife and our friend Eli and a nice bit of a drink – what was there not to like?

Elizabetta and Liz …. Cheers ladies!

We were so happy with our first bit of splurging that we took it a bit further and spent a few dollars more on some seafood at a lively bar and had ourselves a great night. Needless to say that by the end of our evening out the three of us were somewhat worse for wear. This though did not stop us from returning to our campsite and just plonking ourselves down on the sands and putting the world to rights under the stars.

Wine, Seafood and a little bit of a Splurge and Sparkle! … lol!

Eli is a great person to have a chat with under the stars, she is full of ideas and dreams of what she wants to do with her life and I suppose her dream of travelling is exactly what we are doing already. Sometimes the simplest pleasures are the best and feeling pleasantly squiffy whilst putting the world to rights is right up there at the top of those ‘simple pleasures’ … lol! Eli went off to bed and we soon enough followed suit as with the dark came the cold and very cold it was. We did not get to bed until Liz had performed the funniest and most perfect ‘rendition’ of what a drunk person looks like walking on the soft white sand. One of her legs seemed to be going at ‘full speed’ whilst the other was still stuck in the sand and due to her bemused drunken state rather than increasing the speed of the stationery (stuck) leg she actually appeared to be trying to increase the speed of her free leg – I was half expecting her to disappear, corkscrewing into the sands – it was quite hilarious really! A very entertaining way to end the day really!

My wife, before she lost control of her legs on the sands!!!

Bundaberg and a simply Eggsellent evening at Mon Repos – Day 305 – 19 November

It was a decent enough drive through the countryside that took us to Bundaberg, a place that my son had stayed at for a while whilst he was over here in Oz. The town was quite a big one and seemed to be surrounded on all sides by vegetable and fruit farms. As ever we first popped to the local Information Centre to try and get the lowdown on the best beaches round here so we could snorkel and relax on for today was to be a day of some serious chilling, the reason being that tonight we had booked the Turtle Experience at Mon Repos!

Coral Cove – It was much better in real life!

 

So off we went for a bit of a snorkel at a beautiful little place called Coral Cove. This was another of those places which is certainly a sight for sore eyes but where isn’t in Oz. It had all the requisite features, blue skies, aqua seas and golden sands but this was all set off against black volcanic rocks, which seemed to make all of the other features stand out even more. As sometimes happens, the snorkelling turned out to be not too great as there was quite a bit of a swell and we soon found out that as well as looking impressively black, the rocks and the barnacles on them were also quite dangerous to be rubbing up against! A couple of guys on their dinner break seemed to be having better luck than we did or knew the tides a bit better so we left them to it. Now pleasantly ‘exerted’ we felt that we had earned a bit of a rest.

Bargara – you can see why the turtles come round here!

So we drove off to a little place called Bargara which turned out to have it’s own lovely little beach too. Even better was that next to the beach was the entrance to a little lagoon the locals used for swimming and in it the kids were having a great time, laughing swimming and generally messing about, much better than seeing them mesmerised by their phones or their computers. We joined in the fun but at a much more relaxed pace by doing a bit of book reading and we even indulged in a bit of a kip each too. This was of course necessary (lol) as we wanted to be fully recharged for tonight as we had no idea what to expect or how long it would be before we saw a turtle.

Get that damn phone outta my face!

Somewhat refreshed, we cooked a bit of food and then drove down to the Turtle Rookery and viewing centre to eat it in the car park there. Lots of cars were already parked up so we wolfed our food down and in we scarpered. Once inside we were separated into groups and the guides there explained to us that we would wait in these groups to be called up onto the beach where, if we were lucky, we would have the chance to see a female Loggerhead Turtle lay her eggs – fingers crossed eh!

We had only just been put into our group, lucky (?) group two, when we were shouted up as we thought, to go on the beach, things seemed to be looking hopeful. Dash and dammit though – we were only being called up to watch a video about the conservation effort at Mon Repos and how that here they had been particularly successful in helping turtle numbers rise which was great news really. The film done we were called up again and this time we were off outside, surely this had to be the real thing didn’t it?

This was not the ‘business end’ of the turtle!

We followed our guide and strolled along the boardwalk that led to the beach and then as a group, quite a big group at that, we continued along the sands to where another guide was waving us onwards with her torch to where she stood next to some turtle tracks. This was a good indication that a possible mum-to-be had come ashore here. Then, I am not really sure what he needed to be doing but we had to wait for our ranger to ‘set things up’ at the nesting site and then he took us to her to make a semi-circle around the mother’s back whilst she was busy digging her nest into which she would be dropping her clutch.

First was the big egg count – 171 eggs!

Whilst she dug, our guide a guy called Everett, explained a bit more to us about the programme and about the turtles themselves. A couple of things that I should point out at this juncture are that the turtle’s eyesight is as good as ours is out of the water, something which I did not expect and this was why we had to stay behind her outside her field of vision. If she did catch wind of us she might be ‘spooked’ and perhaps abandon her egg laying for another night! This also meant that no cameras or lights could be used at this point too, so all there was was a single light pointing down into the hole that the turtle had made thus far.

My wife, a very willing volunteer egg-mover!

The mother then proceeded to lay her eggs and she really went at it laying 171 eggs to be precise. When turtles have laid between about 15 to 20 eggs they enter a ‘trance like state’, therefore after this number we were allowed to quietly walk round the mother and could even take photos and films which was frankly quite amazing. Then as she was nearing the end of her egg laying we once again switched the lights off and let her be whilst she covered her eggs. The guide then proceeded to inform us that our mother had unfortunately buried her eggs a bit too close to the high tide mark so the eggs would need relocating just a bit higher up. So the ranger’s helper was starting to dig a new nest site whist our mother was filling and covering hers over, for us to soon be uncovering!

Our eggs in their new home! Goodbye old friends!

Her work finished she lumbered her way back towards the sea and it may have been partly due to her size but the egg laying had taken a lot of her strength, you could see that she was absolutely shattered and seemed to just be using willpower alone to make her way back to the water. Once she was back in the sea safely and on her way further out we were asked if we would like to help with the relocating of the eggs and we were most enthusiastic volunteers. The ranger passed us the eggs from the turtle’s hole and we took them up to the new nesting site, easy enough but really good fun and we could take snaps too of our little deliveries as it were. This was a most excellent way to round the night off so, job done we wandered off back to the centre to find ourselves the recipient of a certificate each. Not really sure what we had done to deserve such an accolade as it was the mother turtle who had really been doing all of the work, maybe it was just because we had the biggest smiles! And as we received our awards, group three was only just heading out so God knows what time they would be finished, so once again we had been quite lucky as we still had quite a drive before us to get to our next port of call.

It was not too far but it was dark and in the sticks here dark is very dark indeed, so much so we almost drove past our stopping place. One quick (or to be more accurate, one slowish) U-eey though and we were soon parked up and able to get our heads down but we both definitely went to sleep with smiles on our faces, it had simply been an unforgettable evening.