News and Articles

We will regularly post news and trip reports on this page. So, make sure you check back to keep yourself updated. The latest 10 entries are shown below:

15 Sep 2007: Splash for Trash, Flinders Pier
15 Jul 2007: Mornington Pier
1 Jul 2007: Rye Pier 11°
10 Jun 2007: Shallow Sub and Castle Rock
28 Apr 2007: Easter dive trip to Eden in 2007
21 Feb 2007: A Weekend on Phillip Island
11 Feb 2007: Lonsdale Wall and Drift Dive Spec. Reef
2 Feb 2007: One Weekend in Portland and Ewen Ponds, SA
16 Sep 2006: World Environmental clean-up day (splash for tr  ...
6 Aug 2006: Warrnambool Whale Watching

There are more articles in our archive ...

Splash for Trash, Flinders Pier
(by Craig Newcombe)

OK, so plastic bags were only introduced some 25 years ago. Now, thanks to our ability in all things to be staggeringly profligate, the annual consumption is estimated to be between 500 billion (500,000,000,000) and a trillion (1,000,000,000,000). To put this another way, that is more than a million every minute. So we were off to Flinders Pier for the Club’s second annual Splash for Trash to make a difference.

Wonderfully organized by Sara and AB Divers, Splash for Trash is a world wide event that allows the diving community to give something back to the environment and the community. Thanks again guys for all your hard work and that free fill, giving us something back.

But first we had to assemble the RMIT crew, starting with Camilla, the sort of girl that doesn’t get out of bed for less than 220 bar. Actually, she was already because it was 7.00 am and I was knocking at her door, even if the tank she dived on was considerably less than that. But then, hey, she thinks I’m hyper over-organized. OK, fine, I have to be and I admit she can judge character. Now, let’s get going!

No, in truth, she was fine. So were Lars and Doerte. Ah, but Mark, a man who is to mornings what Socrates was to semi-nude mud wrestling only with a better build. But then he did make up for this by agreeing to update the Club Web page. Choice Bro’. And Joan met us at the Pier making RMIT the largest contingent on the dive. Cool guys, and thanks.

Flinders Pier provides a unique resource for divers, offering one of Victoria’s finest shore dives and which at its best is like diving in your own private aquarium. Preciously, the Pier acts as a haddock, or enclosure, for seahorses and best of all for the glorious iridescent weedy-sea dragons. Hence rumours the old wooden Pier will be utterly demolished to be replaced with a shorter cement one.

But before any of this could happen AB (we’re on first name terms here) had to start us off with catch bags to dive with and boxes to fill, and then a sausage sizzle and hot soup to end with. Wonderful, and wonderfully organized.

Given the amount of fishing line and hooks we found, the local fish are in no immediate danger. Given the amount of broken beer bottles and lost fishing rods we also collected the local fishermen were at considerable risk. Good.

Over twenty divers had collected a fair pile of rubbish that should never have been there and which was pretty satisfying. This was then sorted by hand into recyclable, non-recyclable and bits of old lead for Mark’s next weight belt. Sharp.

On the way home Doerte began finding dollar coins on the backseat. Oh dear you misheard, it might be a tight squeeze with all those tanks under your feet, but this isn’t Bash for Cash dear, but still very ingenuous. Do try to remember that ‘Mark’ in this context is a fellow diver not the common currency within the pre-Euro German financial system. But man that handful did look good (the currency, not Mark). I think he did get most of the money back.

Speaking of Lars and Doerte, this was possibly their last dive before returning to Germany. It’s been great this year to watch them both learn diving, with Lars having completed 22 dives and Doerte getting several colds. Well done and you will both be missed, although the Matthaeus Maneuver of cleverly using an empty tank as indicative of the need to surface and thus dispensing with the bother of complicated dive tables or expensive dive computers will live on and may even grow in the telling, like now.

What did we learn from all this? Reading from your average scientist-type literature they seem fairly convinced that the whole Australian continent is well on its way to becoming uninhabitable. For us whitefellas anyway. On account of the speed at which the water-tables keep sinking and the salt levels keep rising. So I guess I might pop up from a particularly deep dive one day and find that everyone else had left.


Craig


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