Mission Beach, September 2002

Mission Beach is a collection of small towns along the shores of the beach itself. Without a car, it's a bit difficult to get between the different places. I decided to stay at Scotty's Beach House, which is at Wongaling Beach. The basic doubles and dorms looked a bit too basic for me. There's a gap at the top between the walls and the roof, which I didn't think would be good for a light sleeper like me. The woman on reception told me that this was essential in the tropical North Queensland climate. So I went for one of the air-conditioned doubles which hadn't been decorated yet, so wasn't much more expensive. That night it was cold enough for me to put the blankets on the bed. The A/C unit never got switched on.

Just up the road were a few shops including a supermarket and an internet cafe. There was a bar at Scotty's, which had an ATM and which served food. If you went early enough, residents could get slightly cheaper meals in the bar. Out the back was another bar with a couple of pool tables. Each night there was some sort of entertainment provided. This was often variations on the theme of pool competitions, but at least entry was free. Friday nights they had a band and the place got really busy. Saturday morning was really quiet in the backpackers', as there were quite a few sore heads around.

View of Dunk Island from Mission Beach

The beach itself is nice, long, sandy stretch. It overlooks Dunk Island and a few of the other islands. There's a ferry over to Dunk Island and there are a variety of water sports there. Of course, I was interested in the diving, so got in contact with Calypso Dive. I wanted to dive the wreck of the Lady Bowen. This was a 220ft schooner in 1894. It lies in 34m of water, which means by Queensland standards, it's very deep. Calypso only go out to it when they have enough qualified divers. They generally try to go on a Friday. As luck would have it, I was in town on Friday.

So we set off to the site. The boat anchored a short distance away from the wreck and a shotline was put in. I was hiring a wetsuit, fins, tanks and weights only. Their fins were open heel, but they didn't have any booties. This meant they weren't very comfortable or very effective either.

I was paired with someone who wasn't that experienced. There were two other groups who were going in with instructors. So we jumped in and started going down the shotline. The first thing I noticed was that the line was too thin, too floaty and far too long. It took a couple of minutes swimming horizontally before we got to the wreck.

It was a nice enough wreck. All of the wooden decking had long gone, so there were just the metal ribs in place. I did think about swimming right through them, but my buddy didn't look keen, so I only swam through a small section. Inside this section were some flowery grouper and as we made our way up to the wreck, there were a couple of white tip reef sharks, then a bullray and some shoals of yellow snapper.

We didn't quite make it to the end of the wreck before our no-deco time started to run out and we had to head back. At the bottom of the shotline was an emergency cylinder and set of regs. There was also one hanging on the boat at 5m. We had been told to do 4 minutes at 10m and 4 minutes at 5m. This is a somewhat strange deco profile in my opinion. As we got to the line, my buddy showed me his gauge and he had almost 100 bar. He then shot up the line leaving me trailing slowly in his wake. He slowed down a bit and I eventually caught up with him and we got to 10m and stopped. Then he showed me his depth gauge. He had 20 bar. Quite what he had done with 80 bar of air in about 3-4 minutes, I don't know. I gave him my long hose, went onto my backup and shared my gas. We did the required stops. I put a couple more in at 3m and we surfaced safely. Our total dive time was 28 minutes and a maximum depth of 34m. It reminded me why I don't normally dive wrecks at those depths on air with no decompression.

After lunch, we went back in again. The surface interval was only about an hour and twenty minutes before re-entry. This time we made our way right up to the stern more quickly and then took our time coming back. There was a white tip shark near the shotline this time, the other two had settled back in their place on the wreck and there were loads of lionfish and trevally. My buddy was a lot better on his air this time, so we didn't need to do any sharing. As I was just about to surface, hanging around at the 3m mark, I looked down. An instructor with two other divers was putting one of them onto the emergency cylinder at 5m. When they got back on the boat and the instructor checked his computer, he found that he'd missed mandatory deco stops. The other two divers were clear on theirs, but that's not really the point.

We then pulled the shot up and headed back to the shore. We were then thanked for coming and for “not doing anything stupid”. I did wonder exactly what you had to do for it to count as stupid. It was a nice wreck. It would have been nice to do it properly, using nitrox and a twinset. Then I could have covered all of it in one, relaxed dive rather than having to do two rushed dives on it, on which I still didn't see everything.

After Mission Beach, I caught the bus south to Townsville.

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