Well this weekend is what I figured would be the last decent chance i'll get before christmas to get enough crays for the table. Work is getting a bit full on comin up to christmas and was stoked to be given the first two day weekend off i've had in a while and will have for the next few weeks.

Saturday started off with a plan! early morning run out deep to get my centre piece for the entree leg of christmas dinner, one big arse male cray! well as usual my plan went astray sometime late friday night when my orderer at work called in sick.... so in i go to work at 5am saturday morning, in and out by 8am still sort of a day off i tried to convince myself. At the ramp by 10am only to find the carpark packed but, i managed to park the car at the most furtherest bay at the ramp on a 37 degree day with no thongs!

After a quickish trip out me and Jacqui were over our spot that we only visit a couple of times a year out in 27m of water off hillarys. Descending down the anchor line we started to see the bottom appear out of the blue at about 15m and seeing the reef line and ledges taking shape under us it was the same familiar ground as last time. The vis was quite good at about 10-15m. Then the hunt was on! almost striaght away we had a visitor, a nice decent dhui that followed us constantly for the whole 40 minute dive. I'm sure they know all about the ban coz this fish had no care in the world with us and a good sign as we've never encountered dhufish on this reef before.

 We started off well with the crays, both managing two big females that were out exposed walking amongst the weed (unusual i thought) but both bursting with berries and returned unharmed. Looking under the next ledge i saw the bad boy we were after, the tell tale long gangley legs of a big cray! snared him without any fuss but the interesting part was getting him into the catch bag which took about a minute or so... hard part over. we ended up seeing about another 6 or so big jumbos but left them all in peace to do there part for the population. we picked up another six more normal sized crays and spent the rest of the dive getting some happy snaps.

 The big boy pulled the scales down to 2.7kg with 167mm carapace. The idea is he'll be on his back on a salad platter, hollowed out, shell baked and bursting with the meat of his fellow crustaceans.

I even let jax pose with it for the camera :) much better to look at than my sorry sunburnt dial. Also got a quick vid near the end of the dive swimming through a big school of bullseyes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqnnv3DaC3k

Sunday morning we drove down to hillarys ramp only to find the boat queue 100 metres up hepburn ave! stuff this we went up to oceanreef, we launched easy as and changed plans for a pretty dive with maybe some crays thrown in......anyway day two of so called two days without work. We had just launched the boat and the phone rings....its work.... let it ring out, get voice mail... "dave the store is a mess your nightfill screwed up you'll have to come in"..... aww crap! followed by lectures from jacqui about it's my day off! and lectured further about going into work saturday morning on my day off! another call half hour later and another voice mail, i guess i better call back, after declaring i'm all the way out in the middle of the ocean and a solid plan to recover on monday, i'm off the hook and back in the water! We did an easy scenic dive in 12m just ontop of the 3 mile off hillarys. Vis was pretty average but this dive site always throws out somethin new, after about 70 minutes in the water and down on 40 bar we'd filled my catch bag, jacqui got some new pics of some nudibranchs and then we came across (i've forgotten the name) one of those black and white shrimpee thingos with the claws :)

Took this pic and then the batteries died! And some of jax's nudi's

motioned to jax we had to get to the anchor and ascend only for her to point out a new nudibranch we'd never found before! it was kick arse! We're always trying to find some new nudi's different to the western australian nudibranchs that always seem to be everywhere.

Dunno wat kind its is, haven't gotten that far yet but pretty stoked to see two new creatures on the dive today seen heaps of crays before:) I even think seeing this little guy out weighs my christmas table centre piece.

Life's too short for work!