Toothbrush Island 10-02-07

We've done Toothbrush before and after such a great dive at Pig island we felt it was time to go again. We anchored on the NW end of the island. during our surface interval a pair of older divers using what looked like hookas came over to talk to us. They had discovered the Bombo wreck years ago before it had been pilfered. On this day they had found a large (about 3m) admiralty anchor about 100m to the SW of the island amongst the kelp. They had pulled all the kelp away and then left it. We had other plans and headed down and towards the cave. I lost Wayne within the first few minutes of the dive. I looked for him, then returned to the anchor to wait. While waiting I did some long over due skills practice - mask removal and recovery, reg removal and recovery, hovers and fin pivots. I even took the reel from the anchor line and did a sweep to see if I could find him. Eventually I surfaced, put my camera in the boat and was preparing to go look further when up he popped about 40m from the boat. He'd found a very large black ray in the cave so we headed over to check it out. It was huge and half buried in the sand. I rested beside it at a respectable distance so Wayne could take some pics to give some idea of it's size. It was bigger than me and had a huge girth. with air getting tight we high tailed it back to the anchor, finding it easily. We actually dived for 71 mins on air abut the max depth was only 14m and average depth just over 10m.