Poor Knights Islands Diving

Told the dive master that my last dive was 3 years ago but when I was filling in my dive log book, I saw the last log was way back in 2002, a good 7 years ago. I’m really glad that Simon and I went to Poor Knights Island for the dive as it has been on my to-do list in Sheepland after reading that it’s suppose to be one of the top 10 dive site in the world.

Needless to say, on the first dive, though confident, it took me a while to get acquainted to being underwater again. Visibility was great; around 15m and fishes were abundant. The great big difference is the missing corals. Corals don’t grow well over here because of the temperature but instead, I was diving with sea weeds. Also as expected, missing are all the colourful tropical fishes from back home but instead, there were lots of snappers and kingfishes. The labyrinth like underwater landscape also made it an excellent diving experience as we go through small channels and tunnels. Lots of blue mao moa fishes there sheltering from the current and we also saw lots of flat jellyfishes. The dive master told us later that those are actually infant jellyfishes that will bring out to be individual adult jelly fish. The dive lasted only about 30mins as Simon (he himself has not dived for 2-3 years) was chomping the air like crazy.

After a good rest, the second dive was at Nursery Cove.The name was from the fact that this is the place where injured fishes normally come to for rehabilitation .Again, the labyrinth like landscape was an amazing dive experience. We went through a tunnel where the 3 of us squeezed into and we just stopped and turned around to watch all the happening around and above of us. Just imagine you sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool looking around and up, now add all the beautiful fishes around you. We also saw crayfish and moreton bay bug but alas, it's a marine reserve, we can't take anything home.

This time, when Simon ran low in air, the dive master took him back to the boat while asking me to wait underwater. When he came back, he signalled me to do exploring myself while he keeps an eye on me. I was a little hesitant in the beginning because I’d gotten lost diving before and it was a scary experience. As I was exploring, I kept looking back ensuring that he’s still following me but after a while, it was fun because I can just look anywhere I want without always looking in front to make sure the dive master didn’t leave me.

It was good but I wouldn’t put it close to Pulau Sipadan as the great dive. Maybe I need to explore more dive sites around the island to fully appreciate the greatness. I didn’t even take any photos as I think I’d lost my love for photo-taking since my manual SLR days, so for more photos and a nicer write-up on this island, check out this guy blog on it.