Dive report - West Side Friday 24 July 2009

We'd like to thank our lovely DMT Kerry for the name of one of our new West Side sites: Chocolate Fruit Cake.  You'll have to come dive with us - or beg nicely in the comments section of the blog - to get the story behind the name ;)

Anyhoo, that's where we dived first up yesterday and it was beautiful and tranquil. Millions of smaller reef fish - like damsels, juvenile butterfly & angelfish, wrasse and anemonefish - covered the reef from top to bottom and in all the cracks and ledges. Big schools of bullseyes screened some of the deeper setbacks and inside we found shrimps, eels and nudibranchs on the walls. This site also has some great swim throughs and one was packed solid with silver baitfish. Octopus were abundant and a big school of giant trevally swooped across the edge of the reef.
WATER TEMP: 23C
VISIBILITY: 12m
CURRENT: none
SURGE: mild
DEPTH: 20m

Central Station was manta-less, but made up for it with a ginormous roughback ray lazing in the sand and flapping his wings in annoyance at the little cleaner wrasse who were just trying to do their jobs. A massive estuary cod, easily one of the biggest we've seen, puttered over to the divers, checked us all out and puttered off on more interesting cod business. We saw him several times during the dive, like he was just checking to see if we had suddenly turned into something interesting!
WATER TEMP: 23C
VISIBILITY: 12m
CURRENT: none
SURGE: mild
DEPTH: 16m