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Published: January 23rd 2013
After I left Port Douglas, I flew to Sydney, mainly to do a few dives, catch up with friends and get organized to travel for the rest of the year (main thing was that I had to loose baggage).
I stayed the first days in Sydney with a couple that I met while I was working for “Poseidon Reef Charters” in Port Douglas; Ben and Naomi, two professional divers that have been traveling the world the past year and are going to keep at it for the next few years, so it seems. Ben’s a Canadian dive instructor, part musician/writer and Naomi's an Australian Divemaster and full time artist, her website here:
http://www.naomigittoes.com/. The day they went out on Poseidon I was leading the dive and that’s how I got to know them. After the dives I asked them about places they’ve particularly liked and they mentioned places in Mexico and Honduras. Just like other people I’ve met this way, I kept in touch with them.
Anyway, about a month before going to Sydney, I contacted a friend of mine there, Adrian Argeseanu, a Rumanian with whom I did the dive instructor course. Adrian has
a weekend business in which he takes people boat diving in different spots around Sydney in his RHIB (called the “Red Devil”) and I was interested in doing a dive in a site called “Magic Point”, which is a cave with about 15 resident grey nurse sharks. Link to Adrian's site:
http://www.sydneyboatdives.com.au/index.php.
After we set up a date for the dive, I contacted Ben and Naomi and asked them if they were keen on going and they said yes.
A few days before getting to Sydney, I didn’t really have a place to stay, so I contacted Ben and Naomi again and asked them if they could host me for a few days, to which they agreed.
The house I stayed at is in a place of Sydney called Bundeena and it’s not that easy to get to. From the airport I grabbed my bags (including the one with my dive gear) with a combined weight of about 50kgs and took a train from the airport to Wolli Creek Station and there changed trains to get to Cronulla. When I made it to Cronulla, I took a private ferry that crosses over to
Bundeena (the last one is at 6:30pm) and there’s no public transport to get there, so it’s the only option, unless you have a car. I then walked to the house and I was received by Gabrielle, Naomi’s mother, also an artist.
The whole house is full of paintings, sculptures, tainted glass windows and studios scattered along the property, which gives it a unique ambience. There I left my bags and relaxed for a few hours. Ben and Naomi had invited me to do a dive that evening, so I had until 5pm to relax. I fell asleep in a couch reading a book.
We agreed to meet in Cronulla, so I grabbed my dive gear and went down to the dock to take the ferry back to Cronulla. There I met Ben who picked me up in the Hippie Campervan they had rented for a few weeks and we drove down to Oak Park, a site which I had dived the previous year a few times while doing my diving internship. There we met with Naomi and Mel, a friend of hers. It was good to get back to diving in Sydney and during the
With Naomi's family
Naomi, Ben, Hartley, Tiffany, Sil, Gabrielle, medive we saw a lot of nudibranchs, stonefish, a couple of blue gropers and a wobbegong, the usual marine life there. I also saw the “rocking horse”, which is an old metal one that I hadn’t seen in the previous dives, but knew that it was there somewhere (of course I got on).
Back home, the 3 of us we had dinner with Gabrielle, had a few beers and good conversation. It was Ben’s 29th birthday that day.
The next day, while Naomi went shopping and to a few meetings in town, Ben and I went to a dive shop to fill air tanks to do a dive in a place called “Shark Island”, in Cronulla. We were expecting to actually see sharks in this one. We did a 45-50 minute dive to a maximum depth of 12 meters. It was good to dive a totally new site. Along the way, Ben, who’s done a lot of cave diving and was diving with sidemounts, slid into narrow paths, which was impossible for me with my traditional set of gear. We did see a couple of wobbegongs and a small Port Jackson shark.
When
we got back home we were starving, so we stopped by a hamburger joint near the house and took it home and had it with a beer. The rest of the evening was just chilling out and having dinner at some point.
Friday, Ben and Naomi were going to a festival called “Big Day Out”, so I went to the city to do a few things. First thing I had to do was to take my SLR to the Nikon technical support and get the sensor cleaned. After that, I was meant to meet a friend of mine, Marcelo Salas for lunch. I had no idea how hot it was going to be that day: maximum of 47ºC in Sydney; boiling hot.
It took me about 2 ½ hours to get from Bundeena to the Nikon store, taking the ferry and a couple of train combinations and about 40 minutes of walking. After I got that done, I went to St. Leonard’s to meet with Marcelo and ended up having a few beers with him in a pub nearby (the perfect day for that). He’s a very friendly guy and it’s always very pleasant meeting up
with him. We talked about the time we were in Brisbane and went to see the Chilean training vessel “Esmeralda” and he interrogated me about Port Douglas and my upcoming trips. After that he had to get his family to take them to the beach and I went back home.
Back in the ferry (I managed to grab the last one just in time that day), I was sitting in front of an older woman and we started talking. Her name is Connie and had a support dog with her, Panda. This woman is a nurse (she still works a couple of days a year) of German-Jewish origin and her parents fled Germany and established themselves in Ireland. She ended up living in Australia and I think she has been in the area for about 30 years.
When I got back home, I had dinner with Gabrielle and we talked a lot about different topics, family, trips, etc.
Saturday morning was the day set to dive Magic Point. We had to be at the Fisherman’s Rd boat ramp in Malabar (just south of Maroubra) at 1pm, which gave us enough time
to prepare (especially Ben and Naomi who had arrived back late the previous night). We had to get tanks at a dive shop and get to the boat ramp to meet Adrian. The day was cloudy and windy; crazy weather compared to the cloudless 45ºC the previous day. In fact, the conditions were borderline to go diving that day (wind and swell), but Adrian knew it was the only day I could to the dive, so he went for it anyway. It wasn’t easy getting the dive gear and ourselves on the boat, but we managed. We took off on the "Red Devil" and we were prepared to do 2 dives. We got to the site and Adrian anchored and then dove down to see if the anchor was in the right place. Then I went with him so he could point out the direction of where the cave was. The water temperature was about 21ºC (which is not that bad), but I only had a 3mm wetsuit and had just arrived from Queensland, where I was diving everyday with 29ºC.
Magic Point dive
The dive itself was spectacular and exceeded by far my
expectations. The anchor was dropped a few meters from the cave and we stayed outside it, watching the sharks come in and out. The cave is on a wall and outside the entrance is flat rock; sort of like a stage and only about 15 meters. The top of the wall is also flat and it’s at about 10 meters. It’s a very easy dive and divers can also go along the wall either left or right and there’s plenty of schools of small fish, wobbegongs and cuttlefish. But of course the main attraction is the grey nurse sharks; very tame sharks that swim around very slowly. There must’ve been about 15 of them of sizes between 1 ½ and 3 meters. We did about a 50 minute dive and then we surfaced, the 3 of us shaking because of the cold. None of us wanted to be the first to call off the second dive, but we knew that eventually we couldn’t do it. Too bad, because we really wanted to, but it wouldn’t have been pleasant. We had to call it off and so we headed back to shore. No regrets though, because the dive was spectacular. When
After the Dive
Ben, Naomi, Daniel we got back to the shore, we took a few photos of the group and then said goodbye to Adrian.
On the way back home we stopped in a McDonald’s and I had a couple of hamburgers and a coffee, which were a welcome treat.
That evening Naomi had organized a big dinner to which were invited: her brother Hartley and his girlfriend Tiffany, Mel, Jas & Mark. Besides them, Naomi, Ben, Gabrielle and myself.
Naomi did most of the cooking, aided by Ben and most of us had a go at rolling sushi rolls. The dinner consisted on a mushroom risotto, a cous cous salad, sushi and key lime pie for dessert. It was a really good evening and we stayed up past midnight.
Sunday morning I left the house (Ben & Naomi were on their way to Melbourne and I had a few things to do in the city) and so I checked in the following 2 nights in a small hotel in Potts Point (Kings Cross) to be near the CBD and public transport. I used those two days to file tax returns, update the blog, leave
After the dive
Daniel, Adrian, Ben my dive gear with Marcelo Salas so that it can get taken back to Chile (I dropped about 30kgs of weight at least) and I also met with Felipe Kovacic and his wike Isabelle (and their son Bruno) for lunch at the Sydney Fishmarket in Pyrmont on Sunday. They helped me a lot when I first arrived in Australia and it’s always nice seeing them again.
Not too much else to tell about those two days, I mainly used them to get organized for the next couple of weeks. Then it was time to get ready for Melbourne…
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