Rapid Bay

This is car-park diving in the best sense. You drive in, park above the beach, kit up beside the vehicle and walk down, and a typical visit is two dives with the surface interval spent sitting on the tailgate. There is no dive shop at the bay, so tanks have to arrive full. The old jetty was built to load limestone from the quarry cut into the hillside behind the beach and is closed to walk out on, so its pylons are reached by a surface swim — and the water is generally flattest before the afternoon sea breeze fills in.

Underwater it is shallow, dim and structural: nothing much below 12 m, and visibility that runs from a few metres to about ten on a good day. Silt lies over sand between the pylons, the pilings themselves are furred with sponge and ascidian growth, and the light drops through the gaps between them in bars. The dive is the structure — work slowly along the bases, look into the shadowed sides and keep off the bottom, because one careless fin stroke turns the visibility to soup for everyone behind you.

Finding the animals is a patience exercise. Leafy seadragons drift rather than swim, hold near weed and growth, and read as a piece of loose kelp until one of them turns, which is why divers who scan slowly find them and divers who cover ground do not. They are a protected species and the local etiquette is firm about it: no herding, no repeated strobing, no touching, keep your distance and let them move. The site rewards cold-water shore divers, macro photographers and anyone content to dive the same structure repeatedly.