With good weather and calm seas we decided to attempt the Tuggerah.  The Tuggerah is arguably the best wreck dive in Sydney.  Michael McFadyen covers it well on his website.  We found the site OK using our GPS and could easily id the wreck on the bottom finder.  We proceeded to drop down our best anchor and then tried repeatedly to trawl it over the wreck, trying to get it to catch up.  We failed many times and eventually carelessly cut our anchor rope with the prop.  Goodbye one anchor. 

We then decided to attached 2 anchors to the back of the boat and while I monitored the rope, Wayne tried repeatedly to drive over the wreck - all to no avail.  In the end we gave and turned the dive into a training dive.  We knew the boat would drift on the sandy bottom so agreed not to leave the anchor rope when we went down.  We put down the deco bar with tank and regs at what we thought was 15m.  We attached a weighted line to the front anchor and the other end of that line to the deco bar to form a cross over rope. 

Down we went with full tanks and ponies.  The surface had good viz.  That turned really bad at about 20m, then improved again at 35m.  We hit the bottom after 2.5mins at   49.4m, the deepest I had been.  It felt good, viz was OK, and all the gear including camera performed well.  After 10mins we headed slowly up, as per our plan. We saw 2 fish - a leatherjacket and a gobie.  We hit the cross over line at 35m and followed it along and then up to the deco at 18m.  The cross over was 30m long so we had a slow ascent.  We spent 2 mins at 18m depth, then brought the bar up to 5m and completed our deco stop according to our computers.  All this and I still had 50 bar left in my tank.

This was a great learning dive and gave me a lot of confidence about diving to depths around 50m.  Next time it won't allude us.

 

This site was last updated 22/04/12