Exmouth, January 2001

The bus from Coral Bay to Exmouth takes a couple of hours. The scenery remains fairly constant throughout the trip. There's red sand everywhere and bushes, with the occasional tree near the dried up river beds. It's pretty rough country. Exmouth itself was built as a service town to the US military base that used to be there during the Cold War. These days the Americans have gone and there are only a few personnel left there. The town is built about a kilometre from the east side of the peninsula, so it isn't really on the beach.

Exmouth had changed a bit since I was last there. A lot of the buildings had new roofs and there weren't many trees around. In March 1999, Cyclone Vance hit Exmouth virtually head on and they recorded the strongest ever winds seen on the Australian mainland. There were gusts in excess of 280km/h.

Exmouth Diving Centre is part of the Potshot Resort. The name apparently comes from the fact that Exmouth was a prime nuclear target during the Cold War. These days things are a bit more peaceful, though there did seem to be a price war on in town. Backpackers' rooms with air conditioning were $8 and you could share a two bedroom unit, with bathroom, fridge, kitchen and television for $12. So I splashed out on the expensive option! I was on my own in the place for about half of my stay. There were also a couple of swimming pools, which were a necessity. The temperature ranged between 34°-40°C during my stay. Out on the water it was obviously much cooler, but walking to the supermarket was a bit of an effort during the midday heat.

Not everywhere was open as it was off peak-season. Several of the takeaways and the Chinese restaurant were shut, so food choice was a bit limited. I even resorted to cooking because I was getting fed up with chips. The pub at the resort did reasonable meals, though they were a bit expensive. They also did free, cholestrol ladden bar snacks at just after 5pm, which were well worth popping in for. Friday night is the big night in Exmouth. Everybody goes out and there's a disco in the pub. Most other nights are pretty quiet, except when a couple of tuna trawler crews come in.

I did nine dives during my stay. They have a schedule which is posted in advance. They go to Lighthouse Bay and the Muiron islands. At other times of the year they do dives further down the west coast. They also dive the Navy Pier every day unless there's a ship in, which doesn't happen that often.

The trip to the Muiron Islands is a full day trip. It's more expensive but food is provided. On the way out they hand around tortilla chips with dip and lunch was pretty good with bread, chicken, salad and pasta. I did the trip twice and went to four separate sites. The first one was called the Codsite. It was outcrop of coral in about 17m. Like Coral Bay, there were loads of bait fish with grouper and coral trout hunting them. The coral growth was good too. The second dive at the Gap was supposed to be a drift, though there wasn't much current, and it changed direction halfway through the dive, so we ended up swimming against it. There were lots of soft corals, a moray, coral trout, nudibranchs. Less welcome were the five Crown'O'Thorns starfish, but they are indigenous to Western Australia and they hadn't caused too much damage. The viz on both dives was a bit low at 10m.

My second trip took us to a site called The Spit. The coral formed a several of swimthroughs, including one quite long one. I saw a crayfish, coral trout, northwest snapper and for some reason a Spanish flag kept trying to hand around under my chest. Waving my hands didn't seem to put it off and it only eventually gave up when I swam off. Visibility on this dive was again about 10m. The second dive of the trip was to East Side Bommie and it was probably the worst dive of my stay in Exmouth. It was very murky from plankton in the water and the viz was only about 5m. The site was made up of loads of brain corals. Life was OK with the highlights being a very big moray eel and watching a giant sweetlips at a cleaning station.

I also did a trip out to Lighthouse Bay. The boat normally comes back around 2pm, so lunch isn't provided. They stop off at the bakery on the way up to the boat to let you get something. I had fond memories of my previous dive to Blizzard Ridge, so I was looking forward to it, and it didn't disappoint. The site is a limestone ridge. There is some coral, though not that much, but there are loads of fish. Again there were bait fish and groupers hunting them. There were big shoals of fusiliers, Spanish flag and blue lined snapper. There was also an octopus, a big turtle and a white sea snake, which is highly venomous and disconcertingly curious. The viz was about 12m and the dive site is only in 14m, so we did just under an hour. The water temperature was 27°C.

The second dive was at a site called Labyrinth, so called because it's a bit of a maze of coral bommies. There are loads of gullies and overhangs to look into and there were shoals of fusiliers, big grouper and another sea snake. The site was a little bit shallower at 13.5m. Our dive time, including safety stop, was 56 minutes.

On the day I decided to do the Navy Pier, it was very windy. They cancelled the Muirons trip, but we decided to go up and see what the pier was like. When we got there it was a but rough, though nothing much. One of the group decided she didn't want to do it, which was probably a good decision as she wasn't very experienced. My buddy was from Sweden, so we both thought the conditions looked pretty good compared to what we were used to. The viz turned out to be only 4m, but it was still a good dive. We saw a 6 foot long whitetip reef shark, an enormous painted crayfish, frogfish, snapper, loads of soldier fish and a huge Queensland grouper. I was also quite amused to see the old railings lying on the bottom. The pier now sports shiny, new railings since the cyclone. The depth was 13m and we did 54 minutes.

The dive centre was constantly running courses, so i decided to go on the boat when they did the deep dive for AOW students. We went out to a site called Dibley's Dropoff, which was apparently named in honour of that fashion icon, Dwayne Dibley. Unfortunately I was the only one with a computer, so we had to use the PADI wheel to plan our multi-level dive. Consequently it was a bit short. Our total dive time was 35 minutes with a maximum depth of just under 30m and 5 minutes of that was an extended safety stop that they asked us to do.

The site itself was quite nice. It was a coral bommie with the bottom in 30m and the top in about 20m. There were a couple of good swim throughs at the bottom and a large overhang with plenty of fish in it. I'd like to do it again on nitrox sometime and using a computer. I didn't really feel we did the site justice in our short time.

The second dive of the day was a drift dive on the Sponge Gardens. This was the instructor's favourite dive because it was so unlike any of the other sites they did. Basically it was a drift along the sandy bottom in 20m. Now this doesn't sound too interesting, but in fact there were loads of whip corals, big gorgonian fans and feather stars. There were some fish around and a couple of cleaner shrimps hiding in a hollow. The best thing I saw were the sea apples. These odd animals have several arms with feathery ends which they use to catch food. They have a mouth in the middle of their body and they periodically bring the arms down to their mouths to feed themselves. I'd never seen anything like them before, and was fascinated.

My return journey to Perth was fortunately by air. There's a bus to the airport, which had been completely rebuilt since my last visit. Unfortunately, there had also been a cut in flights. Skywest were no longer flying every day to Perth and you could no longer fly onto Karratha and Broome, which is a great pity, as it's a long journey without any really good places to stop on the way.

The planes were quite large though and they had a cabin service. During the flight they kept plying you with food. First they brought around a pack lunch with a (soggy) roll and then later they brought around biscuits and other snacks. It helped to pass the time. The plane stopped at Carnarvon on the way and took about 2 hours to get to Perth, which was a bit shorter than my bus journey up there. Next time I go, I'm going to fly the whole way.

Back to Oz Index

Onto Perth