Dive #6 Relaxedness
Jan 6th 2019
Today’s dive was with Kim again, back at Enclosure Bay. We headed out and to the right/east, to look over the area I’d previously seen, and continued on further east to the point between Enclosure Bay and Palm beach. It was a super lovely swim, really relaxed, although we did glide over a lot of completely barren rocky reef. The area in the yellow square in the image below is almost entirely barren, just bare rock really, with still quite a few kina living in it (so it is worse than the photo suggests):
The area marked out in red has some pretty spectacular over- and underwater cliffs… right out around the headland pretty steep rock cliffs drop straight into the sea, and keep descending for ten or fifteen meters, maybe more… will need to do a scuba trip around there to have a proper look… BUT… even from our brief snorkel out and back today, we could both see that the steep side of the cliffs were largely barren and had a lot of kina still clinging onto the sides. There was still some pretty healthy looking kelp all around the headland, but only to a depth of about one metre of water, everything deeper than that has been eaten.
Although this spot doesn’t really fit the profile of our ideal test site (isolated piece of rocky reef surrounded by sand) I had the thought that it might be a good candidate for a seperate restoration project — there is still kelp alive there, there are lots of kina still present, plus it is a fairly limited area so we could attempt something meaningful there I suspect, and it looks like it would be a super fun place to do repeated dives on. What’s not to love about that?
Still no pictures from these trips. Well, today I got hold of an SD card to use for the trip, but turns out it was the wrong sized card… tomorrow I will be buying the right sized card… and then I will have some photos and video from these candidate sites. No, really, I promise!
Also on today’s trip, I met a guy called Russell out snorkelling for kina in the little bay to the east of Enclosure Bay. He uses them as burley when he goes fishing. He told me that in the 20 years he was away overseas, his impression is that there is a lot more kelp around in his little bay now than there was when he left. He reckons a lot more people are taking kina for food these days, and speculated that this has allowed the kelp to have quite a strong resurgence. I said I hoped that was the case as it is the idea that our project is based around!
He also told me that although there is a lot more kelp around, there are less reef fish, which surprised him, he thought the two would go hand in hand. I didn’t know what to make of this, and have added it to my growing list of things to ask Tim about the next time we are chatting :) He also reckons that there are more snapper to be seen while snorkelling, which surprised me… I still haven’t seen any during these trips.
Russell also told me about an association call Ondine which campaigns for ocean conservation and restoration in the Balearic Islands (Mallorca, Minorca, Ibiza). He commented that even though the Mediterranean seems pretty barren and bereft of sea-life, it amazed him how much life returned once marine reserve areas were set up and gave nature a change to do her work. Nice to hear.
