Mantra
Contributor
I hummed and hawed about posting this as our dive yesterday was nothing remarkable, but thought a bit of a write up about the dive site might be of interest to future Googlers / visitors.
So yesterday we dove the Gold Coast Seaway for the first time. The gold coast seaway is one of only a couple of shore dives anywhere between the NSW border and quite far north into Queensland, hence its appeal to local divers. We have put off diving this site because it's not a simple beach entry, and current can be an issue, and because of that we wanted to be prudent and go with someone who had dove there before for our first time. We arranged to meet another experienced local diver there for this reason. Unfortunately, they were delayed for reasons beyond their control, and so we ended up popping in on our own anyway.
In the end, this wasn't a problem - so my first bit of advice would be if you are a reasonably confident buddy pair, you can dive this site just fine with no prior experience of it. First, i would research the site well. The site is described well here:
Diving The Gold Coast
If you just drive to the very end of seaworld drive, the entry point is about 5m to the left of where it turns into a T intersection running along the water.
Bring gloves (in current you may need to hold on to stuff) and emt shears (there is quite a bit of monofilament around).
Suit up before scrambling down the rocks. It is easier by far to navigate the walk with tank on your back already. The site is dove on slack water, and if you arrive half an hour before turn of the tide you will doubtless see many other divers entering the water. Watch where they step and what they do. Basically, you walk out onto a little concrete landing, step down onto a white concrete step at the right hand side at the end, walk to the end of the rocks, sit, put fins on, and push off. If it it surgey this can be a little tricky to time your push off with a rise of water but it's pretty straightforward really.
We jumped in without our friend because we didn't want to miss the slack tide. It turns out, though, that slack tide was about 45 mins later than the tide time websites would have us believe, so the current was fairly ripping when we jumped in. We had to face into the current (incoming) to avoid water in our masks, and ended up going hand over hand on the rocks down to the base of the short pipe. Viz was maybe 2m with very heavy particulate.
The dive was fun, though. There was a lot of marine life down around the short pipe. We headed east along the sandy bottom to some outcrops of coffee rock and spent some enjoyable time with a quite mobile day octopus before drifting back to the pipe. We had about a 60 min dive, the last 15 mins of so which were spent in genuinely slack water - and this was very enjoyable. Viz cleared up and a lot of smaller fish appeared at this point.
So that's it. No need to be shy of this site, even with no formal introductions. Just watch how other divers enter (this is the hairiest part and its no big deal) and be aware that current can be strong and viz low.
One last tip: a local diver has shared these excellent topographic sketches of the site, which I found really useful in understanding what we were going to dive:
Sand Pipe - Gold Coast Seaway - Diving in Gold Coast, Australia - Wannadive.net - World dive site atlas
Keywords for Google: scuba dive diving gold coast seaway pipe pipes tips hints
So yesterday we dove the Gold Coast Seaway for the first time. The gold coast seaway is one of only a couple of shore dives anywhere between the NSW border and quite far north into Queensland, hence its appeal to local divers. We have put off diving this site because it's not a simple beach entry, and current can be an issue, and because of that we wanted to be prudent and go with someone who had dove there before for our first time. We arranged to meet another experienced local diver there for this reason. Unfortunately, they were delayed for reasons beyond their control, and so we ended up popping in on our own anyway.
In the end, this wasn't a problem - so my first bit of advice would be if you are a reasonably confident buddy pair, you can dive this site just fine with no prior experience of it. First, i would research the site well. The site is described well here:
Diving The Gold Coast
If you just drive to the very end of seaworld drive, the entry point is about 5m to the left of where it turns into a T intersection running along the water.
Bring gloves (in current you may need to hold on to stuff) and emt shears (there is quite a bit of monofilament around).
Suit up before scrambling down the rocks. It is easier by far to navigate the walk with tank on your back already. The site is dove on slack water, and if you arrive half an hour before turn of the tide you will doubtless see many other divers entering the water. Watch where they step and what they do. Basically, you walk out onto a little concrete landing, step down onto a white concrete step at the right hand side at the end, walk to the end of the rocks, sit, put fins on, and push off. If it it surgey this can be a little tricky to time your push off with a rise of water but it's pretty straightforward really.
We jumped in without our friend because we didn't want to miss the slack tide. It turns out, though, that slack tide was about 45 mins later than the tide time websites would have us believe, so the current was fairly ripping when we jumped in. We had to face into the current (incoming) to avoid water in our masks, and ended up going hand over hand on the rocks down to the base of the short pipe. Viz was maybe 2m with very heavy particulate.
The dive was fun, though. There was a lot of marine life down around the short pipe. We headed east along the sandy bottom to some outcrops of coffee rock and spent some enjoyable time with a quite mobile day octopus before drifting back to the pipe. We had about a 60 min dive, the last 15 mins of so which were spent in genuinely slack water - and this was very enjoyable. Viz cleared up and a lot of smaller fish appeared at this point.
So that's it. No need to be shy of this site, even with no formal introductions. Just watch how other divers enter (this is the hairiest part and its no big deal) and be aware that current can be strong and viz low.
One last tip: a local diver has shared these excellent topographic sketches of the site, which I found really useful in understanding what we were going to dive:
Sand Pipe - Gold Coast Seaway - Diving in Gold Coast, Australia - Wannadive.net - World dive site atlas
Keywords for Google: scuba dive diving gold coast seaway pipe pipes tips hints
