Port Underwood
18th March 2006
It would be nice to start the story with the typical, "the day dawned an absolute beauty" but the 5am start meant that the dawn was a wee ways off. I had the job of picking up Joe and being the club representative at 5am meeting the parents. Luckily the club sent the most presentable fella rather than just any old bald hobbit. (Aahhemm - Enough of the old!! - Ed)
Stu (Me), Joe, Paul, Claire, Jim, Sarah, Bryan (not the Irish one) and Dave met at Paul's place at 5:15, rapidly sorted gear and left pre 5:30, leaving the full introductions of the new members for daylight. The first stop was Picton bakery for a few double shot trim soy latte and steak and cheese pies for breakfast and then off over the hill to Oyster Bay. Once there we sorted gear and boats. With myself, Sarah and Dave in my boat and the famous 5 (all the others) in the club boat, we made our way out of "The Port" and up towards Fighting Bay. A Southerly had been through on Friday and there was still an annoying swell to make the viz below average and as Sarah was to find out, not that forgiving on 18 pints of St Pats Guinness!!
Trying to get out of the swell the first bunch of divers, Paul, Joe, Sarah and Dave went down in spot Y that normally yields good numbers of Crays. Unfortunately all 4 divers returned reporting huge numbers of small crays and nothing of substantial size. Jim was keen on a dive further up the coast so "the famous 5" took off around the corner and left Dave and I for a dive in the same area. The viz, as I found out, was fairly average. Dave and I worked from about 20 ft down to the 60 ft mark. There were absolutely heaps of crays around but most of them on the small to just about legal size. I managed to bag a few from the dive and also a couple of nice blue cod with the sling. Once Dave and I were back on the boat Sarah declared that she was too cold to jump back in for a dive and sheepishly admitted that she had probably burleyed the cod into the general area we were diving. We then tootled up the coast to find the club boat. Claire, Jim and Bryan were in various stages of their dive, with Claire emptying most of her tank with a small gear failure and only having a limited dive. Both Jim and Bryan surfaced with fairly light catch bags claiming that they ran into all the crays at the end of their dive and that the next dive they knew exactly where to go and were going to clean up.
We left them to it and went back round the corner to let Sarah get changed out of the swell and also for Dave and myself to throw on our second tanks. Dave and I jumped into spot X (right next to spot Y) and as soon as I hit the bottom I grabbed 2 good size crays, putting Dave into excited fox terrier mode which meant for the next 10 minutes I was either tripping over Dave who was trying to stay 1 step ahead of me or I was kicking him ‘cause he was so close. Needless to say we both had a good dive landing a few crays. We saw heaps of Butterfish but the swell and viz made it just too hard to spear them and also real tricky to stay in one place trying to grab crays.
The others had a repeat of their earlier story. Paul and Joe had surfaced with several crays having seen heaps of under size and the other 3 were about to go "cleaning up" in the predetermined top spot. About that time a pod of 40-50 dolphins came cruising through. Some of us leapt in and were allowed the opportunity of a lifetime to be within touching distance of what I deem to be the most wonderful animals in this world.
Jim, Claire and Bryan then jumped in for their 2nd dive back at the "clean up" spot and all 3 of them surfaced with relatively CLEAN catch bags.
After that, both boats steamed off back to the launching ramp with another brief stop to swim with the same pod of dolphins. A quick stop on the way home for a debrief and a photo shoot in Canvastown, saw most of us scheming how to avoid flatmates, mates birthday parties and family and book some quality couch time to get over the 4 something AM start.
All-in-All a great day made possible by dedicated club members and the awesome privilege of having a club boat. See you all again next time.
Stu Marshall