Friday 2nd February – A day’s diving at the Poor Knights Islands

What a difference a day makes. We awoke to this:

We got to the dive centre for 8am, checked-in and boarded our boat for the day, Bright Arrow, owned and run by Dive Tutukaka.  There were some very experienced divers on our boat. We had the least experience under water, everyone else’s number of dives went into the hundreds and even thousands!

Heading out from the coast

It took less than an hour to reach the islands. Never mind the amazing dives we were potentially going to be doing, I was also excited about some of the rare seabirds here – Shearwaters, Petrels and an old favourite of mine, the Gannet, with its bright yellow head and pointed beak for diving for fish. 

Before we got into the refreshingly cold water, our guides took us for a circuit of the biggest sea cave in the world.

The entrance to the biggest sea cave in the world - we did venture in but it looks better from the outside!

Hmmm... not a great look?!

We got prepped for our first dive.  This would be some of the coldest water Simon had ever dived in.  We needed to don 7mm thick wetsuits and even hoods, which felt restrictive and looked a little ridiculous (right) but it was all worth it.  The thunderstorms yesterday had done us a favour and cleared the waters, we had amazing visibility. You could see as far as your eyes allowed.   

We floated along past forests of kelp alongside cliff-like underwater rocks.  The underwater life was also plentiful. We saw numerous rays, nudibranchs and the highlight for me was swimming through the blue Mao Mao arch, where we were surrounded by huge shoals of fish!

Simon suited and booted for the cold

Ever wondered what it was like to swim in a fish tank?!

Nudibranch sea slug - this is why I appreciate the small stuff - look at that intricate design, it's incredible!

The islands and their arches gave us beautiful scenery above the water as well

A packed lunch was provided on board during the break between our two dives. The dive in the afternoon was called ‘the tunnel’.  I’ll let you guess why.  We swam next to a steep, high wall, having to be careful to watch our depth as there was nothing underneath us.  We still had good visibility and enjoyed seeing brightly coloured sponges, more kelp and wildlife including rays and eels.

The tunnel, getting ready near the dive site

A honeycomb moral eel and, below, a golden moray

 Hopefully, the above video is of a ray....

Coming out of the water after the second dive a few of us were starting to feel the cold so were glad that we started back to land promptly.  It was very choppy. We kept our minds off the conditions by chatting to the other divers.  I enjoyed chatting to Doug, from Connecticut, USA, who I said would get a mention on the blog (job done Doug!).  He was testing us on our USA geographical knowledge after our mega road trip – it turns out we need a refresher!  How quickly you forget things when you don’t have a map in front of you!

We made it back to land about 330pm.  On the recommendation of our dive guide Ashleigh, we used the clean $2 showers at the marina in Tutukaka, as then we could take a short drive up the coast and free-camp for another night at Woolleys bay, just south of Matapouri.

Woolley's Bay Beach

Our Britz camper tucked in the Freedom camping zone