Dive Number: 59 15/07/2010 15.40 Stansbury Jetty
Wind: 10 knot NW’s
Tide: 3.5hr after 0.68 low tide at Port Giles
Conditions: Dull and overcast conditions had set in , with some rain during the dive.. Water was fairly mucky, as was the dive in general. Possibly due to incoming tide and rain though.
Bottom Type: Thick carpet of seagrass with small patches of shell grit base. Jetty pylons with cvery little growth.
Visibilty: 5m
Water Temp: 12c
Bottom Time: 51 minutes
Max Depth: 4.2m
Air usage: 70bar/1000psi
SAC: ???? litres/min
Details: Stansbury Jetty was the next stop on my way down south to Edithburgh. Again this was another jetty i read very little about but i though i’d give it a go. This was basically a muck dive with very little around apart from a lot of Razorfish shells.
Camera Details: Singma 17-70mm , single SS200 strobe
Dive Report: I entered the water and soon spotted fishing rod. maybe a bad omen. I started to turn on my camera and strobe, only to realise that i hadn’t flicked the auto focus switch on my camera, so i had to make my way back out, which was a good opportunity to grab the fishing rod and return it to the car. Take two: i reentered and swam about half way out. I noticed small fish ‘parachuting’ from the pylon and dropping to the sea floor. I roughly saw where he landed, so descended and tried to locate him. Bingo! An Anglerfish sitting motionless next to a Razorfish shell. A great find at a jetty that seemed to promise so little.
A pylon was just to the left in the above shot and it made it very difficult to get close and get a nice composition. This was the best i could manage, but i’m glad i decided to take off the fisheye and put the sigma 17-70 on. James Peake reckons this is a Spinycoat Anglerfish, Trichophryne mitchellii, a pretty rare species, so i consider myself lucky lucky to spot this guiuy the way i did.
After leaving the anglerfish i headed over to the break wall, but there were only a few zebrafish. If it wasn’t for the anglerfish i wouldn’t recommend this dive at all.