Dive report - West Side Tuesday 16 June 2009

Enormous swell kept us inside the reef for our two dives today but the dive sites sure spoiled us for variety and numbers of fish!  Coral Gardens was first up with its beautiful coral formations and hundreds of staghorn outcrops - all filled with black & white humbugs. Nudibranchs have been busy laying eggs and their beautiful bright red, pink and orange egg spirals adorned rocks, coral outcrops and big shells stuck in crevices. Usually it's the big things that catch our attention but today it was one of the smallest baby reef sharks we've ever seen that was the gem of the dive!
WATER TEMP: 24C
VISIBILITY: 8-10m
CURRENT: mild to moderate
SURGE: none
DEPTH: 6m

Ranger Bommies is always teeming with damsels in a huge rainbow of colours, brightly coloured parrotfish and deep red-orange Tomato Anemonefish. Today we also had stingrays of all sorts all over the site - huge bull rays, big roughback rays and bright blue spotted lagoon rays. Two banded sea snakes checked us out before resuming their forage for morsels in the deep cracks of the bommies and a big green turtle came right up to us, looked us over, decided we were unworthy and pointedly swam very slowly away from us - he was a total character!
WATER TEMP: 25C
VISIBILITY: 120m
CURRENT: mild
SURGE: none
DEPTH: 16m