Huskisson, Jervis Bay, October 2002

Huskisson is not a big place. The main road has a few shops, several cafes, a pub and an RSL club. The town seems to be quite popular as a retirement destination. There are also a couple of dive shops. I'd arranged to go diving the following day and the pub looked the best bet for accommodation. I took a single room which was reasonable at around $30. The furniture was old and the bathrooms definitely needed some plumbing work done to them.

Beach in Jervis Bay

In the afternoon, I went for a drive around Jervis Bay. The beaches have got gorgeous white sand that you normally associate with more tropical climes. The water looked clear, if cold and the bay was flat calm. There is only a small entrance to the sea, so it's reasonably sheltered from the open ocean.

That night I ate down in the pub. Like many Aussie pubs, they served food from 6-8pm. The food was good, but it was very quiet. After the meal, I sat in the public bar on my own watching the television in there. At 8.30pm, they started clearing up around me. I think there were 2 other people in there. The excitement was just too much for me, so I went back to my room and read my book.

I was diving with Pro Dive Jervis Bay and had to be at the shop for 9.30am. After the previous night's festivities, I was up around 7am. All the cafes in town were shut and they still hadn't shown any signs of opening by 9.30am. Not that there seemed to be many customers around. I made do with a pie from the service station, which locally made and rather good.

I sorted out the few things I needed to hire and we walked down to the boat. The skipper asked everyone if we wanted to dive with the seals, something that will soon not be allowed as part of new regulations being introduced in the marine park. I was indifferent, but was happy to go along with everyone else's decision. The trip out took us through the entrance of the bay and into the open ocean, which had a couple of metres swell running. On the way, we stopped for a while and watched three humpback whales breaching the water.

We arrived at the dive site which was a cliff with loads of seals on it. The skipper checked everyone was happy diving in such a swell. Of course, now that we'd arrived, no-one was going to say no. On our arrival, the seals started to jump into the sea. Going by the smell in the air, they could definitely do with a wash.

We kitted up quickly. I wasn diving with an Irishman and was a bit wary when he didn't know how much weight to bring because he hadn't dived in a wetsuit before. My suspicion that he'd learnt somewhere tropical was wrong though. He'd learnt in Ireland and had only ever dived in a dry suit. The water temperature was 16ºC and I could have done with a dry suit myself. Instead I had a two piece 5mm wetsuit and full foot fins.

A pair of Kookaburras

The visibility was rubbish, certainly no more than 4m and less in places. There were also a load of non-stinging jellyfish in the water. The surge was pretty bad. You couldn't swim against it and at one point my dive computer thought I was ascending too quickly when I was actually hanging onto a rock. There were a few fish, though the presence of seals meant that they were hiding in gaps in the rocks. Fortunately, the seals were quite playful. When diving with seals, the thing to remember is not to stay still, because they just get bored and go away. You need to spin around, wave your arms about and generally act like an idiot to keep their attention. There were plenty of them in the water with us and they've got no fear. When you can move as well as they do underwater, you've not got much to worry about from ungainly divers.

After 32 minutes it was getting cold, so we came up. Finding the boat again in that viz proved beyond everyone. We weren't that far away when we surfaced though and I made sure we weren't too close to the cliffs. Our maximum depth was 21m, but it was the cold more than anything else that limited the dive.

We set off to calmer waters for lunch and anchored up to the north of the bay near some old torpedo tubes that had been installed by the Australian navy in the past. After lunch, our second dive was here on some rocks. There was loads of sponge life on the rocks as well as lots of Sea Tulips. Fish life was reasonable, with red mullet and damsel fish. Other people saw some weedy sea dragons, though I didn't. As I'd seen one two days before in Terrigal, I wasn't that bothered. The visibility was better at about 8m and we lasted 39 minutes before my buddy signalled that he was cold. I was freezing too, so we went up. I don't care what anyone else says. 16ºC is drysuit temperature as far as I'm concerned.

We got back to shore at about 4pm and I decided to press on south. I drove down to Batemans Bay and went to the YHA. It was not a very big hostel, but I had the entire male dormitory to myself and there were only 5 other guests and they were all female. That evening I had a reasonable Mexican meal in town, but the pubs all looked virtually empty, so I bought a bottle of wine and went back to drink it in front of the television with the other guests.

The next morning I set off south again down the coast until just before the town of Bega, where I turned inland towards the Snowy Mountains.

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