Thought I'd throw up a few pics from a trip to the west end shark cave last thursday, Had a pretty good trip out there from hillarys with hardly anyone launching on what seabreeze had picked as a pretty good day out. After a little bit of sounding out new ground to the north of the island we pulled up to the mark at around 930 to a flat sea but with the swell at about 1.5 and predicted to rise to 2.5 by midday we were pretty keen to get on with it as the place is a bit crappy to dive in swell over 2 meters.

The cave was an awesome dive, we were lucky to have six sharks in the cave with us most around 1.5-2.5 meters with one bigger shark around 3ish meters. Great easy dive in the sanctuary, we mainly stayed in 19 meters with a max of 24 and dive time of 47 minutes. It was a good change from powering around looking for crays for a change. We mainly stayed around the edges of the cave so not to spook the sharks and took turns moving inside deeper to get a few closer pics each but the low light inside the cave made it a bit challenging. The cave itself is really cool with or without sharks, its huge and descends down around 9 meters below the sounded depth of the reef. Last three pics are by the mrs with her camera.

After the dive it was time to see if we could get any interest from an early arrival metro mac. Didn't go very hardcore and opted for red head, chrome pink deep divers and a skirt incase anything else was around but left the teasers at home, we spent the next few hours trolling west around to the north side of the island with nothing to show but a fair bit of weed some bad sunburn. Bit spewing there were no fish on the score board but we could've tried harder. If anyone is interested we had surface water temps at west end of 23.9 and 22.5 at 24 meters.

After that we went for our second dive at the City of York wreck site, we came back with a few crays but they were very scarce to find and we were still finding a few good sized females in setose around the place. Some good tight swim throughs to the north of the wreck site, really long and we really had to squeeze through most but they just keep going and going. Didnt really bother taking many pics of the second dive and only took a few of the wreck for my computer but nothing flash and worthy of posting.

So with something for tea in the icebox it was back to hillarys with about a 10 knot westerly for a nice easy trip back to the ramp by 4:30, had a pretty sweet day poking around rotto with even sweeter weather.