Bay watch

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Having left Surfers halfway through Schoolies Week, I still had an enormous stretch of coast to traverse to escape their clutches and unfortunately my next intended stopping point - Byron Bay - was probably the No. 2 favourite spot for Schoolies after Surfers. However it turned out to be a vastly different scene, as during the daytime most of the Schoolies were at the beach (unlike me) and at night I found a pub that was more for locals and older tourists hence remained schoolie-free.

Byron is a compact place with nowhere far from anywhere else, and has a laid-back atmosphere most conducive to chilling out. It possesses several fine beaches, a lighthouse, and Australia's most easterly point, not to mention a dive site (Julian Rocks) that's only 3km out to sea and is reputedly one of Australia's Top 10. With the wind blowing fairly strongly, there were a number of kite surfers out and about, which was the first time I'd seen this activity in Australia. From the lighthouse as well as several lookouts along the beaches, it was possible to see turtles fighting against the surf, as well as rays gliding smoothly through the shallows.

Diving at Julian Rocks had been on my agenda since leaving Cairns, and was generally a much more pleasant experience than the Wolf Rock scuba vomiting had been (though read on ...) For my first dive I was with a dive master and a guy who had been doing dive master activities but just hadn't formalised it, i.e. I was the most junior person by far again, but there was also a spare dive shop employee who came along and accompanied me back to the surface when, predictably, my air reached the threshold earliest.

The dives here were also done via a beach launch but in a sturdier boat than at Wolf Rock. When we parked the Jeep, the handbrake didn't hold and it rolled forward into a parked 4WD ... that just happened to belong to the rival dive shop in Byron.

When we'd been trying on our gear at the shop, one of the other group members had tried putting their suit on back to front. Though technically I'm a pretty poor diver, I think I've discovered the secret to putting on a wetsuit the right way round and not inside out - simply make sure the knee guards are on the outside and then orient things from there.

Despite the shortness of the journey to Julian Rocks and the fairly decent sea conditions, I started feeling nauseous as soon as we'd moored and began gearing up. This sensation was even worse before the 2nd dive, and once I was back in the boat after the 2nd dive I did indeed heave up some bile - about a yard away from a schoolboy snorkeller.

That issue aside, it was a good dive site. Visibility was ~10m and we didn't need to go deep. We saw more grey nurse sharks, a selection of wobbegongs (carpet sharks, which apparently inflict more bites on humans each year than any other shark), a seemingly petrified (in the original sense of the word) turtle and a truly enormous stingray that I originally thought was a manta because it was so large. The end of the stingray's tail had been bitten off by something, presumably a shark, giving it a strangely misshapen appearance. We also did a very short swim-through at the Cod Hole.

For the surface interval (i.e. the period you need to remain at the surface between dives in order that the level of nitrogen in your blood drops to an acceptable level to accommodate your subsequent dive), we returned to the shore, honking the horn as we approached the beach to clear the surfers and swimmers out of the way.

The group for the 2nd dive was significantly less experienced. I buddied up with a girl from the dive shop who'd done even fewer dives than I had, but the general similarity in experience made for a much more comfortable dive. The other 2 guys were a pair of Danes from my dorm, who I ended up spending some beer time with. One of them had done most of his dives while spear-fishing in Norway. The other hadn't dived for a while, I think, and ended up running his air down even faster than me. This second dive was trickier because the current was a little stronger. Unfortunately the guide had the annoying habit of stopping every minute or so to point at a fish then trawl through a little waterproof booklet he was carrying and indicate the name. Though this was a great idea in theory, in practice it was impossible to read the writing from more than about a metre away, leading to 4 fairly inexperienced divers crowding around the guide in a challenging current. Collisions, both with each other and the rocks, naturally ensued.

Just in case anyone was under the impression that Australian waters maybe were benign, there was a story in the news about a teenager having one of his legs bitten off below the knee when surfing in Western Australia, and the Danes were boogie boarding off Main Beach at Byron when the lifeguards called everyone out of the water for 30 minutes because of a shark sighting.

On returning to Byron after my small road trip (blogged separately), I was somewhat surprised to find 2 guys in my dorm who proudly announced that they were Schoolies from Sydney. I'd assumed Schoolies Week would have been long finished, and perhaps my dismay may have shown itself when I asked them why they hadn't gone home yet. Though that could easily have come across as rather rude, they took it well. It turns out that New South Wales finishes school a week after Queensland and so there is a second Schoolies Week after the first ...

Byron threw up the usual assortment of repeat encounters, from Team Hamburg to the 2 German girls from my Whitsundays boat to Matt and Michelle from Hervey Bay and finally Maaike. Having hyped up Julian Rocks as a dive site, I felt suitably bad when Maaike's first dive there produced 3m visibility, no interesting sightings of anything, and a profusion of algae that apparently stick well to long hair.

On only one night at Byron did I really notice a distinctive counterculture feel to the place. On a patch of grassland just off the main street, a group of fire dancers gathered to perform. They danced while either juggling burning clubs, or twirling ropes with lighted ends, to a beat rapped out by an assortment of drummers who arrived independently but successfully jammed together as a seamless rhythm section. I think such things used to be quite a feature of Byron in the past, but now the role of the place as a mainstay on the backpacker circuit has ensured its alternative nature has been smoothed out to the point of barely existing. It's still a fine place to relax though, and it was an effort to pack my stuff up again and continue south.

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Photos

Julian Rocks
One of Australia's Top 10 scuba sites

Australia's most easterly point
With Julian Rocks at top left

Byron Bay
With Julian Rocks at top right

Comments

[Gerrr]

oh WOW! Niiice. Wow, wow. Beautiful! Love it... I would put Australia on my top - to visit spots... but its soooo insanely expensive to fly there...