COMMENTS & OBSERVATIONS

The Team, Julie, Terry & David, joined a dive charter out of Rosslyn Bay Boat Harbour, Yeppoon on the MV Adori captained by John Hallet. The diving onboard was coordinated by Gordon Evans of Turtle Town Scuba of Bundaberg. Once onboard the Team was joined by Sheryl Wright to make a diving group of four. (Another group of 4 rounded out the divers on the charter.) The Adori headed for Tryon Island in the Capricorn Group of island cays. Diving sites are dependant upon wind direction and tidal current at the time. We undertook 10 dives in total – 4 dives on the south face of Tryon Island, 2 on the east face, 2 dives on the north west face of North West Island and a final dive in Pumpkin Passage between Pumpkin Island and North Kepple Island on the return trip.

The areas our team dived at Tryon Island southern side, consisted of scattered coral bommies on a sandy substrate. The corals in this area were predominately healthy and included branching, massive, encrusting and foliose types of hard coral, along with a variety of soft corals. Due to the amount of substrate worthy of investigation our team never made it as far as the reef crest. Tyron Island east side, although dominated by branching hard coral, and several extremely large patches of encrusting leathery soft corals, was extensively covered with a diverse range of hard and soft corals. Bleaching and damage were very minimal on both sides of the island.

North West Reef was also dominated by branching hard coral on the reef but included several large massive, irregular shaped hard coral bommies located on the sand near the reef crest. Coral within this area was mostly healthy, with no bleaching observed, although there were some aged rubble patches. The swim to the reef from the mooring takes you over areas of sand and sparse sea grass inhabited by large numbers of small Conch shells. The area directly below the mooring (2m2) was dived at night, and turned up an amazing array of critters including active conch shells, baby octopus, juvenile flathead, juvenile scorpionfish, pipefish, sole, moon snails and crustaceans, whilst the mooring line hosted a variety of crustaceans, fish and sea slugs. Unfortunately the dive time was limited to 30mins so we expect there is much more to find in this very small area during an extended night dive.

Pumpkin Passage has several reef areas and our team dived the northern reef. The site contains scattered coral bommies on a sandy substrate, but swimming further north a dense wall of branching Acropora coral was encountered. Since this coral is not conducive to finding sea slugs, we back tracked onto the sand and scattered bommies. Although the visibility was limited the corals within this area appeared healthy with limited bleaching observed.

The small number of sea slugs recorded (we have recorded greater numbers during some double dive on the Sunshine Coast reefs) is a factor of the coral substrate and shorter dive times but a number of species new to our database were sighted. Of the total of 43 species 28 were spongivores.

TOTAL SPECIES SIGHTED: 43

DIVE IMAGES GALLERY

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