UWAUC once again headed down to Dunsborough Beach Backpackers YHA for the Australia Day long weekend. 16 club members had a cracking couple of days diving - however things started fairly interestingly with the boat trailer getting 2 flat tyres just outside Bunbury. After 6 hours by the side of the road and countless calls to the RAC, Ash, Kamila, Duy and Pauna arrived in Dunsborough around midnight with Chromodoris and her trailer on the back of a flatbed truck.
We’d feared the worst as far as getting new wheels, given that Friday was a holiday, but Kam managed to locate an awesome local wheel mechanic who came out early morning to fit us with 4 new trailer tyres…diving was back on and only 2 hours behind schedule!
After some delicious bacon rolls as made by the President, we managed 3 dives on the HMAS Swan on Friday, with the group 1 going first and third including a spectacular early evening dive as the sun was getting lower in the sky and lighting up the water nicely. In between times, the rebreather/twinset group managed a ninety minute dive – although due to some pants navigation some divers (myself included) had to surface after going 28m down the line to the bottom as they couldn’t find the 100m long wreck! The vis was quite decent when we got down there, and as usual we cruised up and down the corridors inside the hull and got nice and rusty.
A few cans of Emu and some idle banter were had back at the Hostel, to the backdrop of the Aus Day Bogan Theme Party hosted by the caretakers. Plenty Bintang singlets and dodgy haircuts although I’m not sure whether they’d had any advance notice or not…
For the first dive of the morning, Volker decided to take us out to the fish aggregation cubes (the concrete structures like the one that’s painted blue beside the Quindalup boatramp). These are arranged in 5 groups of 5, around 30m apart, and sit at around 27m on a sandy bottom without much else around. It was quite a nice dive, although there weren’t a huge number of fish around…but we did see a couple of cool things like a really weird flatfish and a massive skate. The club managed to get 2 more dives on the Swan after that, by which time everyone was pretty tired out and we headed back to the hostel for showers and a cold drink.
Dinner was an awesome bbq of homemade burgers (thanks Kamila!) and some more high jinks.
Sunday was pack-up and head back to Perth day after a really great weekend. Thanks to Kamila and Ash for organising all the logistics and driving the boat down, and to Volker and Neil for skippering…and to everyone else for making it such a fun, laid back trip with some pretty special dives and social times. Can’t wait for the next one!