On New Year’s Day Lisa and I went down to river mouth end of our beach, which meant we jumped in the car and drove the 3km to the most eastern carpark. The reason for this was purely because I wanted to have a snorkel at this end, my first dip in these waters where the reef is very different from the beach close to our house. It was early, but there were still a number of 4WDs parked up and driving up and down the beach:
The water close to the shore was not very clear but as I got further out it improved. This area has more pronounced bommies with sandy patched in-between. With a 2m swell and slightly murk water it was not possible to get images to show the formation of the bommies clearly. It was however good enough to snap some images for the different plants:
The area is far more colourful and has a greater variety of both soft and hard corals, as well as marine plants. It can also be known for having more big shoals of fish, but today I didn’t find any in great numbers and those I did see were quick to hide away from me. Still I was happy just to have a snoop about:
In poor visibility it can feel sketchy snorkelling above the sandy patches between bommies, not knowing what lurks beyond your vision. But I stuck at it and as I came to the end of one sand patch I saw what looked like an eel near the base of a bommie. Expecting it to shoot off I took a few snaps from above, before duck diving down:
Once I got closer I knew it was a shark, and can now say with certainty that it is a Black-spotted Catshark. My field guide suggests that these types of sharks are usually found in deep water, with them being found in shallow water only very occasionally. Shallow being less than 60m, so I feel very lucky to have seen this one:
As you can see it allowed me to get very close, in fact it never flinched and I went down to check it out several times getting almost eye to eye with it. Eventually I started to swim off, and as I took one last look back it slowly moved to find refuge under the bommie. I drifted off continuing to check out the colourful marine plants, with no intention of trying to identify them:
As I headed back to shore the swell was picking up and I got caught in a shallow section where the formations completely changed, from limestone bommies to boulder type formations. These seemed to be made up of what looked like thousands of tubes. It was getting too rough to safely get close and check out what might or might not being in the tubes, somewhere for me to check out on a calmer day:
Sandbagged 