Coffs Harbour, December 2000

The XPT train takes 8 hours to get from Gosford to Coffs Harbour. It is quite a long way, but it's not helped by the fact that the train line seems to go through all the hills inland from the coast, and so is rarely running at anywhere near its rather modest top speed.

Coffs is quite spread out. We were staying a motel called Bosun's Inn which is on the opposite side of the road to the biggest beach, Park Beach. The motel's owners were very friendly and helpful and gave us lifts to and from the train station on our arrival and departure. The nearest shopping mall is about 15 minutes walk away, though there was a nice BYO restaurant nearby and the Hoey-Moey pub and backpackers just down the road. The pub did some quite nice food, though it wasn't very busy and didn't have much of an atmosphere. The motel had a small pool and a hot tub, which really did get very hot.

Off the coast near Coffs are the Solitary Islands. These small, rocky islands are now a national park and people are not permitted to land on them because they are an important nesting site for sea birds. They're also at the confluence of a cold current coming from the south and a warm current coming from the north, so they make a good dive site.

I'd booked a couple of days diving with Jetty Dive. The shop is located in a parade of shops down near the jetty. There is also quite a good selection of restaurants in the same parade, but it was quite a walk from our accommodation. It was certainly too far to walk carrying my kit, so I asked them if they could pick me up. The good news was that they could, the bad news was that they would be there to pick me up about 7.10am in the morning. It was probably just as well there wasn't much night life to be had.

The first day's diving booked was cancelled because of the swell. The next day the swell had died down slightly, and probably more importantly, Jetty Dive's new boat arrived. It was much bigger than their old boat, so they could go out when it was a bit rough. I hired a two piece 5mm wetsuit, boots, fins, tanks and weights and it cost me about $100 for a two dive trip.

The trip out to South Solitary island was a bit lumpy, but once we got there, we moored in the lee and it was relatively calm. The plan was to go in in a couple of groups. One groups was going to do a "deep" dive to about 30m, so I said I'd do that one.

We were buddied up and entered the water and descended. The guide was going pretty fast, so we didn't see much on the way down and, when we got to the bottom, it was just sand. To me it seemed a bit pointless going "deep" just for the sake of it. There certainly wasn't much to see down there and it severely reduced our bottom time. On the way up we had more opportunity to look at the fish. There were quite a lot and there was also some coral growth. The water temperature was about 23°C, but every now and then you hit a cold patch which felt noticeably colder. The maximum depth was 32.7m and my dive time was 52 minutes, though a lot of that was spent at the end near the line. The visibility was about 15m.

After the first dive, we all had a hot drink and some cereal bars and biscuits before the second dive. The dive was a drift along the west side of South Solitary and it was better than the previous dive. There were several wobbegong sharks, a couple of big bullrays, 4 smaller stingrays and a large blue grouper, which followed us for most of the dive. This time our depth was 17.2m and my dive time was just under 50 minutes. The viz was a little bit worse than the previous dive at around 12m.

I then had gooda couple of days break from diving because it was Christmas. On my next trip we went out to South Solitary again. There was a strong southerly current, which is a problem because it often messes up the viz. On the dive we only got about 5m and there was quite a lot of bits in the water. I did still manage to see a crayfish and an octopus though, and there were several large batfish hanging around the line as we did our safety stop. This time we stayed shallower and only went to 24m.

For our second dive we moved over to Split Solitary to see if the viz would be any better there. It wasn't, but it was an OK dive and the coral was certainly better there. There were lots of ledges with bullseyes hanging under tem, plus wobbegong sharks, snapper and some more batfish.

It was a pity about the visibility, especially as they had had 30m viz the week before we arrived. I still enjoyed the dives though and Coffs Harbour was a nice, relaxing place to stay. Next we headed off to Byron Bay on the CountryLink train, which finally arrived an hour late.

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