Little Palm Beach

I suspect that there are many in our club who view shore dives as being 'less glamorous' than a junk dive and too much trouble.

Well I beg to differ. We had a great dive from Little Palm beach last Sunday. The weather was perfect; sunny, warm and flat calm seas. 4 fun divers, 9 trainees and 5 instructors enjoyed the pleasant relaxing conditions. It was also especially good to introduce our new members to one of the different 'diving conditions' listed in the new qualification record.

We enjoyed good 4 - 5m viz and lots to see. A school of 40 - 50 baby barracuda heralded the start of our dive. There were thousands of gobies in the sand, mainly shrimp gobies, a fingered dragonet, long-finned Garoupa, fang blennies, barred soap fish and a good number of anemones with their resident 'clown' fish. Keiko and Kanako reported some type of leafy scorpion fish (believe it or not - photos are on their way!!!). Perhaps the only disadvantage was that the tide was pretty much fully out and we had about a 70m surface swim to find a suitable depth for our vertical descents/ascents (long surface swims are becoming the norm for Andrew's trainees, or as he puts it 'good opportunity for finning practice' - tee hee!).

The sunken tree that had previously been anchored here now seems to have gone and with it the juvenile long finned batfish that we saw here last time, but if anyone has a spare tree maybe we can plant/sink a new one?

Thanks to LS for marshalling the dives so well!

Paul Bayne