Due to Monday being a public holiday I took an extra day off from work as
a flexi (day in lieu of unpaid overtime).  Caught the overnight bus from
Perth 7:30pm Thurs and arrived in Coral Bay 10:30am Fri.  Apart from
watching the evening movie I totally flaked out only waking when the bus
driver made a racket waking everyone just before 7am to have breakfast at
Carnarvon.

FRIDAY
After unpacking and having lunch 3 of us motored off to Mauds Landing for
a relaxed dive with all the feesh.  The leopard shark that is normally
sleeping its head off near the mushroom coral mound was no where to be
seen.  The vis is down now as we are due for the coral spawning season.
There are normally a couple of false starts before the big event really
gets cracking.

Checking out many of the staghorn mounds we discovered there were 3
generations of the one fish family taking cover in there.  In particular
the gobbleguts appears to have a really good breeding season.  The male
adults with their mouths full of eggs, the sub-adults and the teenie-
weenie babies literally the length of your small finger but only about 5mm
in width with their see-through tails.  Nicky came across a very large
pregnant pufferfish with a mad maze-like pattern all over it.  It was so
lazy it just lay there in the opening of a coral outcrop letting cleaner
wrasse pick it over.  Did not move an inch even though Nicky and I got to
within 3 feet of it for a pic or two.  Large schools of trevally and baby
barracuda were schooling around .. the trevally always have that 'in a
hurry' look on their faces.  Saw 3 different types of trumpetfish .. many
of them the largest I have ever seen yet in this area.  I picked up 25
drupella snail to dump in the rubbish as they are pests and eat the live
coral.

The first whaleshark was spotted right in the mouth of the North Passage
two days ago so it looks like this will be a longer than normal whaleshark
season which is good news for the boat operators up here as it has been a
bit quiet of late ... too hot for many tourists .. they'd rather head down
south to Margaret River country.

SATURDAY
We got up early this morning with the plan to get in a quick dive as the
weather report said it was gonna be a wild and woolly day with a cyclone
whizzing around up near Dampier.  We are crossing our fingers it does not
head back out to sea as it will pick up then and probably come back in
further down giving Exmouth a bit of a rough trot.

We shot out to Asho's gap being the closest dive spot that is of interest.
Checked out a lot of the anemones to see how the anemonefish were going.
Went around the corner to check out the Cabbage Patch and were totally
surrounded by trevally, barracuda, wrasse, surgeonfish of every colour,
sail-fin tangs, trumpetfish, butterflyfish .. it was absolutely wonderful
just to freeze in mid-air watching the fish go around and around.  Due to
the limited vis the fish are not as skittish for some reason.  I was again
picking up any drupella snail I noticed eating away at the staghorn
coral.  Reckon I had over 100 from this area alone.

I continued on drifting in the mild current towards the Cabbage Patch
which is a huge mound of coral.  Even with the poor vis I could make out
the white tip sharks schooling around it.  Normally they only stick around
for little bit before dispersing somewhere else but today was my lucky
day.  At first they were a little tenative of me .. more due to my
bubbles .. but they soon got use to the funny creature blowing bubbles
at 'em and, one by one, they gradually came closer and closer to where I
was tucked with camera at the ready.  Soon the cleaner wrasse came out and
it was on.  The sharks cruised in just over the top of that coral bommie
opening their mouths for the cleaner wrasse to pick over.  It was funny to
watch the sharks slowly sinking and only jolting back to reality when a
false cleaner wrasse zapped in to give them a nasty nip. Snapping their
heads around and with a flick of their tails they disappeared off in to
the murkiness only to return 2 or 3 minutes later to go through the same
routine.  I really wished I had a digital camera then as I soon ran out of
film :-(  This is the first time I have dived this spot and witnessed the
sharks actually in action at this cleaning station.

On surfacing we discovered the weather was not gonna turn out as bad as
the weatherman had said so we decided to try out a new spot further south
of Asho's Gap due to CALM having put in a new mooring in that area.  Right
underneath the boat we found a huge patch of anemones.  Two types of
anemonefish were in residence.  We went around a few of the large coral
outcrops just to see what was there.  The coral was nice but there was not
the fishlife we were accustomed to at Asho's Gap.  We came across a small
orange-spotted stingray and could not believe when it same over to us and
then around us for a bit.  Normally these types of stingray take off at
the first sight of a human or duck head-first under a coral bommie to
hide.  It was then we noticed it was minus an eye on one side and kept
running in to the staghorn coral if it went too low so it was doing its
best to motor along in the upper water regions which is why we noticed its
unusual behaviour.  The staghorn coral in this area was more dead than
other spots I have seen and it soon became obvious why.  Apart from the
normal smothering by various types of algae seen in this area it was
obvious the drupella snail was thriving in this spot.  Well, not for long
as I took out 200+ of them little blighters.  In fact when I got back to
shore the exact count was 319 of the pests.  Off to the tip they went to
suffer.

Well, will post again 2morra.  Think we will be heading south to Eel
Bommie but it all depends on the weather on the day.
Viv