Sponge gardens

In the south of Tasmania, along the rough coast line you will regularly find seals on the rocks. Between swimming and hunting in the water they lie in the sun to rest. With their brown bodies they don’t stick out on the rocks. At times you will only discover them when they move. If the weather is calm you have a chance to swim with them.

“Tomorrow I have another surprise for you”, our dive guide Blakey mentioned after a number of days. Of course we wanted know directly what it was but Blakey kept it a mystery. “The diving will be a little deeper and I would put the wide angle on your camera”, Blakey said. After all the surprises which we had already experienced this week we really could not imagine what more we could expect. In the evening we almost crushed our brains trying to figure out what the surprise would be, but we had to trust Blakey on this. Therefore the wide angle lens was placed on the camera and full of expectations we went diving the next day.

Like every morning when we sailed along the coast, we enjoyed the splendid rough coast line. This time Blakey stopped the boat close to a number of large rocks near the coast. He told us what we were going to see here. On a depth of 30-35 meters we would find a large sponge garden. Off course we had seen sponges at our tropical dives before, but we really could not imagine a lot of sponges in the cold water of Tasmania. Full of expectations we prepared for the dive.

Under water we quickly noticed that the promised surprise was real. We descended and on the bottom we saw a large quantity of sponges standing there in several forms and colors. Large, almost white, bulbous sponges were varied with enormous orange sponges. And between the sponge’s we found dozens of sea whips. We would return several times this week to this spot to enjoy the scenery.

Later that week we also made a number of dives in North east of Tasmania. The coastline at the East is less rough, therefore it is possible to make some shore dives. But also boat diving over here is more than worthwhile. With the boat you can reach the sponge gardens which are also abundant over here. At the harbor of Bicheno we made our shore dives. We saw sea horses, sea dragons and between the rocks some crustaceans. At our second dive in the harbor we found some sea spiders. We had not seen these animals before, small yellow spiders hardly recognizable in their environment. You tend to forget that you are under water!