DIVELOG JUNE 406

S ometimes you leave it too long between drinks. I’ve been trying to work out when the last time I managed to get across to dive Rapid Bay Jetty, on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia, and the only thing I could come up with was it was probably sometime in the 2000’s. Way too long.

It was interesting to see the differences. Back then there was no second jetty. Nowadays there is a beautiful, new jetty that you can walk out on, down the stairs and onto a ramp to easily enter the water and swim over to the old jetty. Back when I did it last, I was scrambling over large loose rocks near the base of the jetty, a necessary evil at the time, but the appreciation of the easy entry and exit was always at the back of my mind on this trip. Another difference was that part of the superstructure of the jetty has disappeared below the waterline, leaving large gaps in the woodwork. There is now an exclusion zone around the superstructure for about the fi rst 5/6th of its length. You are not allowed within 15m of the structure until you get out towards the end of the jetty. The ‘T’ section is fi ne, but most of the rest is not. I didn’t really see the need for this when I fi rst arrived, as it was high tide and the pylons in the early parts of the jetty all went into the water so all looked fi ne. At low tide it was easy to see that only the middle pylons were holding anything, the outer ones ending above the waterline. These sections of the jetty will fall at some stage, so the exclusion zone is very necessary.

A trolley is a great idea for here, putting your gear on at the car and carting tanks and cameras the few hundred metres to the stairs before doing the fi nal dive preparations just made things easy. Entering the water was a breeze and then we had to decide how to navigate out to the end of the main jetty. We did this dive several times whilst we were here, and fortunately had better than 15m viz each day, so at times we went down and dove along keeping the superstructure just in viz to our left, and other times we swam on our backs on the surface until we reached a suitable place to descend. This really is a marvellous structure to dive. It might get to around 10m in depth at high tide, but much of the dive is done in the fi ve to seven metre range. There is plenty of rubble under the jetty for critters to hide in and under, and the fi sh life is spectacular! As usual on any trip I have a list of things I’d like to photograph. I never expect to get them all, or maybe even any to be honest, but a bit of research to give me a focus is not a bad thing. This trip I managed everything I wanted, and then started to look for more.

The mosaic leatherjacket is widespread around southern Australia.

31

www.divelog.net.au

DIVE LOG Australasia #406 - June ‘24