Waglan Island

Corsair, Waglan Island, 19 Nov 2006


Pleasant and sunny, a relaxing coffee on the veranda at ABC, incoming tide and a forecast for ‘light’ winds. A great start to the day and, to make things even better, Mike B is diving his rebreather so on-board entertainment is guaranteed! ;-) Neil has brought his family on board so the plan is to move the waves through as quickly as possible and squeeze in a few minutes at Po Toi restaurant.

The sea is calm and, despite a small swell, we press onto the east side of Waglan. A rare treat this, being one of the most exposed parts of the HK coastline, but it provides a genuine wall dive! The first wave are kitting up as Mike deploys the shot. Brian’s sonar reads exactly 20m (exactly as planned) but the buoy seems far too low in the water! Oops! Brian suddenly remembers that his ‘blue’ line is the 15m line, not 20m. However, it is not too hard to lift the shot and quickly attach the ‘red’ 5m extension to the shot. Topper idea from Brian; these pre-made shackled lines make shot work a lot easier! It was also fortunate that we were using Brian’s large buoy!!!

Louise, who is working on her Sports Diver, is my buddy and we descend down the shotline that now has the added advantage of ‘colour coding’ the last 5m! Water quality stays remarkably good and we have 3-4m viz and enough daylight to comfortably dive without torches even down at 20m. We head out East over some lovely small fans, feather stars and soft corals. The coral seems more plentiful down deeper, but we are at our max depth, so we turn back North West and make our way up the wall. Not much chance of urchins holding on here, so the wall is well colonised by nudibranchs. Lots of damsels swirling in the swell up at the top of the wall. The swell up at 6m makes it more comfortable to stay at 8m so we deploy our dSMBs and swim back SE towards the Corsair.

Excellent dive and the second dive did not disappoint except that a ‘murkocline’ had developed below 18m. Mike Pak had the top find of the day with a Bumble Bee shrimp! Surface interval excitement included an idiot boat driver ignoring our A flag, whizzing past the Corsair and running over our drift-line in order to drop fishermen off on their rock perches.

All in, fun for everyone and Mike Belshaw’s rebreather worked perfectly, although his VR3 failed, but fortunately Brian had a back up! ;-)

The flights had done a great job of keeping rolling with minimum ‘faffing’, well done to ADM Rob Christie (welcome back by the way!) and we managed to squeeze in a quick 40min meal at Po Toi, where Rita ordered a huge amount of food, which kept her quiet for a very short time!