Exmouth Diving report - Muiron Islands Wednesday 13 January 2010

Woohoo!! No wind! Finally. It's been blowing a gale here since the end of last week and we are sick and tired of it. We're ready for this spell of no wind, beautiful temperatures and fabulous sea conditions that the forecasters are promising us.

We got back into our diving routine by hitting Whalebone out at the Muiron Islands. Unfortunately, things were still pretty stirred up so the visibility wasn't great. Fortunately, the fish don't care and we still had a great dive. Heaps of schooling baitfish are thick on several areas of the site, including in the swim-thrus. Enormous estuary cod cruised right alongside us for ages then veered off into the murk. Lots of good sized barracuda were patrolling and we saw more brilliant green parrotfish chomping the reef than usual. We couldn't see very far on this dive, but boy were there a lot of fish around!
WATER TEMP: 23C
VISIBILITY: 3-5m
CURRENT: none
SURGE: mild
DEPTH: 13m

Knowing that most of the sites on the west side of the Muiron Islands were going to suffer from similar visibility, we decided to have an early-ish lunch, do a big snorkel through Turtle Bay and then hit East Side Bommies for dive two. It was like being in a different ocean. Beautiful blue water and even more action both on the snorkel and on the second dive.

East Side Bommies gave us turtles, blue spotted stingrays, white tip reef sharks, barracuda, trevally, schooling drummers, schooling convict surgeons, nudibranchs, batfish, bannerfish, moorish idoals, more big cods, bright orange coral cods, heaps of goatfish and more bright yellow butterflyfish (of several varities) than you could keep track of. Fabulous dive to end the day!
WATER TEMP: 23C
VISIBILITY: 10m
CURRENT: mild
SURGE: none
DEPTH: 8m