Shellharbour (Australia)

October 10, 2015 OzDive

Jun 2014

The Arch

Shellharbour, Australia

Shellharbour is a few minutes South of Wollongong and contains one of the best shore dives in Australia with plenty of sea life (blue devilfish) and small critter such as spiders and sea horses. If you are not sure where to dive, I highly recommend going with the 'Shellharbour Scuba Dive Centre'. This was quite an exciting dive trip: Mick took us to the arch, which is quite a long way from Bushranger's Bay. You won't be able to swim it unless you have a scooter, which we luckily had this afternoon. Also, you will need a Nitrox mix as this is a 1h+ dive at more than 28m - so deco guaranteed. The dive itself was, well, simply stunning - every second of it. The arch is a massive swim through located just before the Bass Point reserve peninsula. It has all sorts of sponges, corals, and critters along its wall and a few meters further down the coast is a big cave where we found a couple of banded shrimps. But this isn't all - we found a big and a few smaller red-yellow striped spiders. This is not always guaranteed as they are hard to spot. Luckily our dive guide found a few; they are simply gorgeous - truly a natural masterpiece. I need to do this dive again - it had it all: action, caves, rays, corals, and critters.

Jun 2014

Spider Rock

Shellharbour, Australia

Simply a stunning dive. We took the scooter out again, left the gutter towards the east until we finally reached spider rock. The macro life is just overwhelming, we spotted many different spiders and a red nudibranch I have never seen before (and I have seen many). We were so busy exploring the environment that we ran into 40min deco (if we would have been on air, fortunately, we tanked nitrox) - altogether we spent about an hour around spider rock at more than 22m; the entire dive took 1h 28m with a max. depth of 27m on a single tank - 50 bars left - puh.