Aussie Road Trip

SEADRAGONS

Richard Smith and four buddies start their 2,000-mile Australian diving road trip around Adelaide’s cool waters

When Marvel’s superhero crack team - The Avengers – assemble, they don’t seem to have problems with multiple flat tyres thwarting their every move, or end up accumulating more 7-Eleven snacks than you could shake a stick at.

I’m not saying that our little team are quite The Avengers, but I know my way round a seahorse, Wendy Brown has organised and led liveboard charters for 20 years and has at least 15,000 dives under her belt, Yann Alfian is one of Indonesia’s most-experienced dive guides and has amazing critter-hunting eyes that can easily spot a needle in a haystack, while Ned and Anna DeLoach, two of the mostinspiring people, whose natural history observations have informed scientists for decades, have helped the rest of us identify all the reef’s fishes and critters with their ubiquitous ID book series. This concluded the quintet of divers for our inaugural Australian road trip that would be the trip-of-alifetime around Australia’s cooler southern waters. Between us, we had an elaborate and unusual critter wish list, one that hopefully we were in with a good chance of finding given our collective backgrounds.

We were fresh off a similar adventure that I had organised for the same group about 18 months prior in temperate Japan. So, we were already in the groove and decided to really embrace the chilly water diving. In Japan we had heated vests and 7mm semi-dry suits, but we decided that wouldn’t cut it in Australia. With temperatures in Tasmania as low as 13˚C, I ditched my old and leaky drysuit and got fitted out with cosy new one. I didn’t want uncontrollable hypothermic shaking to affect my seadragon encounters.

Inquisitive Tasmanian blenny

Rich algal growth in South Australian waters

Having missed out on the Japanese species, when Wendy spotted a juvenile Port Jackson horned shark swimming under the jetty she disappeared in pursuit

Crab feasting on fish discarded by anglers above

Shore dive with bountiful gorgonian growth

The charismatic and unique pyjama squid

I was based in Australia for seven years for my PhD research on pygmy seahorses, and had used the opportunity to do plenty of diving road trips during that time. The most extreme had been after submitting my thesis, when my friend Laura and I drove a good 4,000-mile round trip from Brisbane to Tasmania. We shore dived all along the coast, allowing me to really tailor this trip for my friends knowing what animals they wanted to see. In fact, Laura and I had driven from Adelaide to Melbourne just a year before, and I had decided this would be the best place to start our current dive safari.

It turned out that the dry-run Laura and I had made the year before had taught me some valuable lessons. Our first stop had been Edithburgh Jetty, an amazing cold-water muck dive three hour’s drive to the west of Adelaide. I hadn’t had as much time as usual to plan our spontaneous trip, so we turned up in Edithburgh to find that you couldn’t hire cylinders. Only the local petrol station did fills, but had no tanks to rent out. So, after spending the night at the local caravan park, we drove back to Adelaide and picked up four cylinders. We seemed to have spent about 12

hours out of the first 24 in the car, but it was a good learning experience nonetheless.

With Wendy, Yann, Ned and Anna, I was prepared. We picked up our minibus and went off to Diving Adelaide, a great little shop near the centre of town. There, we filled the bus with ten cylinders, plus all our dive gear, tons of weights and several big cameras. Unfortunately, pulling out of the car park we picked up a screw in one of the tyres, which we only noticed upon hearing air hissing out at our first supply stop

Sparring male southern pygmy leatherjackets

just down the road. Wendy drove us into a tyre repair centre just as the last puff of air left the tyre and, holding our breaths, we scraped in on the tyre rim. Luckily, they had a new tyre for us and off we went on our merry way, hoping we’d put all disasters behind us.

Several hours later we had driven almost to the tip of the Yorke Peninsula west of Adelaide and arrived in Edithburgh. It’s a quaint and sleepy town, with one main street and a couple of shops and cafes, but little else. The Edithburgh Caravan Park has simple rooms with a kitchenette, which was more than ample for our needs. After settling in, we took a walk along

BIOGRAPHY

Richard Smith, a British underwater photographer and writer, aspires to promote an appreciation for the ocean’s inhabitants and raise awareness of marine conservation issues through his images. A marine biologist by training, Richard’s pioneering research on the biology and conservation of pygmy seahorses, led to the first PhD on these enigmatic fishes. Richard organises and leads marine life expeditions, where the aim is for participants to get more from their diving and photography by learning about the marine environment. His book, The World Beneath: The Life and Times of Unknown Sea Creatures and Coral Reefs will be released in September 2019. www.OceanRealmImages.com

Rock crab off Edithburgh jetty

A tiny southern pygmy leatherjacket

the foreshore and to the jetty that was the main reason for us visiting. Like many shore dives, the best time to dive Edithburgh is on a slack tide. The currents are reduced and visibility, as a result, is often better. We took the rest of the afternoon to put cameras together and prepare for the slack tide the following morning.

One of the first critters that we all wanted to see is the cheerfully striped pyjama squid. At just a couple of inches long, they would be easy to miss, so together we looked at an image of the animal and discussed where we might find them. It seemed like a good omen that within two seconds of Anna putting her head into the water, before even descending, she’d found one! The rest of us were still negotiating ourentry, but very happy to finally get in and see one of these spectacular blackand-white cephalopods so quickly.

Once we were all in and had watched the pyjama squid for a while, we followed the jetty away from shore. The deepest we ever got to over the four dives we made there was 6m, but three of the dives were to just 4m! I hadn’t got the hang of weighting in my new suit yet, so had a very awkward underweighted dive in the shallow water. We didn’t want to stray too far from the jetty structure as this is an area well known for great white shark sightings. In fact, there have been a number of fatal attacks, including one just off Edithburgh in 2014. However, a different local shark was of particular interest to us. In Japan, Wendy had been very keen on seeing the indigenous Japanese horned shark, which is a prehistoriclooking small striped shark, with diagnostic horns in front of the dorsal fins. There are nine species of horned shark found around the world, with two in Australia. Having missed out on the Japanese species, when Wendy spotted a juvenile Port Jackson horned shark swimming under the jetty she disappeared in pursuit. I only caught a brief glimpse of it, but

The Maori, the world’s third-largest octopus species at Rapid Bay

was happy that she had her dream fulfilled. Over the next few dives we found many unusual critters and many endemic animals too. Southern Australia has plenty of marine creatures found nowhere else on Earth, and this particular area has more than its fair share. I spotted a scarlet cardinalfish found only in this particular part of Australia. The Tasmanian blenny, with its elaborate long cirri, was another highlight. Another, the warty prowfish, was a species I was

unaware of until I looked it up after the dive. It is a type of grumpy-looking fish, which is variable in colour but in this case was a rusty orange hue. Among all these southern Australian endemic fishes, probably the most striking and memorable is the male ornate cowfish. It has great horns at certain spots over the body, is covered in elaborate hexagons and stripes, and just to add to the wild attire tops it all off with a bright orange tail.

After several daytime dives, we were shocked by the transition of Edithburgh by night. Between us, our group has dived all the tropical muck dive locations, but none of us had ever seen so many blue-ringed octopuses. I lost count at a dozen, but there were probably double that.

Again, these were an endemic Australian species, the southern blue-ring, found only in these cooler southern waters. When not watching their antics, I was excited to see the huge numbers of short-head seahorses. Usually they are hard to find, being just 10cm in length, but at night they emerged to the edge of the algae bushes and there were many dozens of these too. All in all, although I’m not a huge night dive fan, this was one of the best I have ever done and

it made for a great conclusion of diving in Edithburgh. Our next location as the crow flies was very close, just across the bay on the Fleurieu Peninsula, but to access it we needed to drive back up the Yorke Peninsula, past Adelaide and a further couple of hours south. We kept the cylinders with us, as we would be planning our own dives in search of one of Australia’s most-beloved of marine animals, the leafy seadragon. We had allowed for a couple of day’s diving around the Fleurieu Peninsula, to pick the best site for dragon action, but our first dive at Rapid Bay yielded five leafies, so we were more than happy. The old jetty has lots of algal growth around its pylons, and is just a short swim from the new jetty. It’s a fair walk from the carpark to the access stairs at the end of the jetty, probably around 1km in scolding sun and mid-30s heat. With full gear, camera and all the weight required to stay down in a drysuit, it’s a pretty arduous trek. We decided to invest in a small trolley to help with the steel tanks and made several trips back and forth for the gear.

The water in early February was in the low 20s both here and at Edithburgh, so we were cosy in our drysuits. We did two 90-minute dives with these majestic beasts, swaying

All in all, although I’m not a huge night dive fan, this was one of the best I have ever done and it made for a great conclusion of diving in Edithburgh

Tasmanian blenny and rich invertebrate growth

One of at least a dozen southern blue-ringed octopuses at Edithburgh jetty by night

Yann and Wendy observing a leafy seadragon

back and forth in the gentle swell. None of the others had ever seen a seadragon before, so there was rather a lot of pressure to find one. I was very happy that we all had a good amount of time to observe these animals in their natural habitat. These large pipefish are not considered to be endangered, but they are only found in this small part of the world and do suffer a certain amount of poaching for the aquarium trade, for which they are highly sought after.

With a couple of seadragon dives under our belts, we decided to spend a little time at the world-famous local wineries before starting our long drive to Melbourne’s jetties that would be the next stop on our journey. Soaking up the local sights above the waves is surely part of the adventure too, and the Great Ocean Road’s 12 Apostles was next in store for us! n