Michael Roelens
By about 10:30pm on Friday night, most of us had arrived at the Dunsborough Beachouse Hostel, where an esky full of beers was ready for the weekend. Just because I knew I'd be arriving late into Dunsborough, I requested to be on the afternoon boat shift the next day, which made it possible to organise a sneaky shore dive at Canal Rocks with a few of the locals there: Aaron Goodhew, Tom Hirscher and Yvette. I had examined that dive site a few times on Google's Satellite maps already, because it looks like prime dragon territory.
At 7AM, we were out at Canal Rocks already, after a hearty breakfast prepared by Aaron and Alan, to go and explore the depths around the corner of Canal Rocks, finding 20m without any trouble at all. My first time diving there, I was impressed by the structure, and its pristine looks: big boulders, a few swim-throughs and big walls full of fan corals and Western Blue Devils. We didn't find any dragons, however, which surprised me a bit, but at least I was now familiar with the site.
Then on to the boat for a couple of dives on the wreck of the Swan, with pretty good visibility (~15m or so). It's a bit of a swim from there to a better descent point (the commercial moorings), but that just meant we saw some huge schools of salmon on the way there.
The wreck itself lies in about 32m of water, which means it's pretty easy to exceed your No-decompression-limits, but most of us were diving with nitrox to make sure we could get properly narced. There's quite a bit of growth on the wreck, and a few tubes right at the top of it harbouring a few curious blennies. In the meantime, Kim and Rebecca were cooking up a storm for dinner.
But I had something else going through my head: the night dive that was following. There just had to be dragons out there at Canal Rocks! Despite all my (unsubstantiated and ridiculous) claims, I eventually found one willing divebuddy in Tobin, to go and explore Canal Rocks again at night, after a long day of diving. And were we right! It only took us maybe 5 minutes of swimming out from the boatramp before we found our first weedy seadragon, soon followed by a few more, and then a few more still. We ended up finding about 30 of them in less than 5m of water, making Canal Rocks one of the best dragon sites in the world. I had fun trying to capture as many of them as possible on camera, until my camera battery ran out. And just then, when we were about to surface because we were almost out of air, we stumbled upon the most pristine looking Leafy seadragon I had ever seen. Still a juvenile, it must have been only a few months old. I had trouble containing my excitement, and I was lucky enough to be able to take just one more picture before my camera even refused to turn on. At least, I was able to come back, skipping into the hostel, to show our fellow club members.
So excited by this, I ended up bailing out on the boat dives the next day in favour of doing more dives at Canal Rocks. I had to go find that leafy again. Plenty of weedies to be found during the day, and a good sized wobbegong too. We just didn't find that jewel again however before it was time for Dylan and I to cook dinner: a full-on Mexican fajita feast. After that, it wasn't too hard to excite a small crew to join me for the night dive.
When night fell, we headed out again to the rock where we had seen the elusive leafy seadragon, and there it was: in exactly the same spot as we had found it the night before. This time with with a full battery and 4 groupies with me, we were able to capture some decent shots and footage. That just made my weekend.
On the way back up from Dunsborough the next morning, a few of us decided to do some more shore dives: at Eagle Bay, and then the Busselton Jetty. Visibility in both places was amazing, with big schools of old wives, a few giant Australian cuttlefish, and some stunning nudibranchs and emperor shrimps. The guys at the Busselton dive shop were super-friendly, and even let us return the trolley after hours. And yes, that meant we were so late driving back into Perth that we basically had no traffic jams whatsoever. And that is why I dive, my friends: to avoid traffic jams.
Special thanks to: Volker, for skippering, Dylan and Alistair, for organising us all, Anton for driving the boat down there, Alan, Aren, Margie, Tobin, Rebecca, Clare, Daniel, Kim, Andi and Matt for helping it make such a great weekend!