Our summer has been magnificent but very humid.  The sort of weather that
makes a person want to play hookey and go diving.  Julian and I plannned a
boat dive for last Thursday but a quick southerly blow put paid to that
idea.  Today - we thought - our luck would be better.  In terms of weather,
it wasn't!  The morning was overcast and the sea sloppy so we took the soft
option and went to Shelly Beach!  :-)

A few of us have, from time to time, spotted a large turtle there.  Julian
clipped an article from yesterday's local newspaper about a large turtle
that had washed up dead on Manly Beach this week.  Apparently it met its
fate by drowning after becoming entangled in one of the shark nets.  It was
estimated to be about fifty years old.

Despite the surface conditions the U/W visibility was a good 20-metres and
the water temperature a constant 23 deg. C., comfortable enough on a single
dive to just wear a lycra suit.  On the swim out to Dragon Patches we
counted about nine sting rays and one large numb ray about the size of a
large serving plate.  We resisted the urge to prod it and continued on our
way, passing three medium sized wobbegongs and, in the sand close to the
kelp beds, a magnificently coloured Rock Flathead.

Although we only managed to spot three seadragons, we did bump into a giant
cuttlefish; a small school of long toms; several large schools of
yellowtail, ladder-finned pomfrets and roughy's; blue damsels; painted
shrimps; wrasse and large eastern blue groupers.

Heading back around the point and into the beach we left the reef wall and
swam out over the sand and seagrass beds.  A place that - because of its
seeming barreness - we usually avoid.  Julian found a small seahorse lurking
in the weed - the first that I recall seeing at Shelly Beach - and we
quickly discovered  an enormous number of octopus (octopi - whatever!), two
of whom appeared to be in the act of mating?  Very well disguised against
the surrounding seabed, one lay on the surface of a burrow with one single
tentacle depending into the hole where a second octopus lay with the tip of
the tentacle grasped into its body.

There were also a number of Jimbli, (a box jellyfish related to the more
venemous sea wasp of tropical waters), about six centimetres long, drifting
with the tide.

It was a 75-minute dive that went by in a flash!  :-)

Strike