Fosters Down Under: Diving at Batemans Bay

This past weekend, we celebrated Blair's birthday by going on a dive trip to Batemans Bay. We also wanted to break-in our new scuba gear (new regulators and BCDs) before our trip to Bali and Lombok in July (i.e. our winter).

We managed to do a total of 3 dives over the weekend. Our first dive was an easy shore dive in Guerilla Bay on Friday afternoon. During the dive we saw lots of small fish and had many, many encounters with different types of sting rays. Sadly, we accidentally flooded one of our dive cameras and the other one was on the fritz so we didn't get any pictures from the dive. To make matters worse, Blair's regulator began free flowing and now needs to get repaired -- not a great start to the dive weekend.

Luckily the dives the next morning made up for all of this. We did two boat dives with Pure Scuba. The first one was at a site called Black Rock Tunnel, which had us going through our first long tunnel at 50 feet long. We both like going through tunnels, but let us tell you, doing one this length at a depth of 65 feet was a bit eery, particularly when it was a one-way and required us to turn around in order to get back out. 100 feet in an enclosed space like that was not really our cup of tea. The second dive that day was an easy exploration dive at a small reef.

During these dives, we saw many more sting rays, several varieties of small fish, various nudibranch, starfish, groupers, etc. The visibility was only about 20-30 feet, and the day was very overcast, so the photos didn't turn out as colourful as we had hoped. Regardless, here are a few of the pictures we took.