I was first shown the pygmy pipehorses of Kurnell but it was the ones at Bare Island that first got my attention. Experienced local divers like Michael McFadyen and Kim Dinh had posted images on social media and that started my journey.
Kurnell is about an hours drive from my home on Sydney's, Northern Beaches. If you have ever driven in Sydney you will know the traffic is terrible and the parking horrendous. Planning your dives has to be first thing in the morning otherwise you run the risk of not being able to park, which means no diving or if you are lucky then you will probably spend the entire day at the dive site.
On Saturday I arranged to meet Kim and Eddie at Bare Island around 9am. This is a little later than i would usually get there so cherished the lie in. We got kitted up and headed into the water. I am on a closed-circuit rebreather with Kim and Eddie on open-circuit. This allows me a longer dive, but also was the cause of me losing them initially. I descended, got my equipment dialled in and tracked them on the surface. I stopped to take a few test shots and by that stage they were gone from sight. I surfaced, but they had already descended. I knew roughly where they would be, its a relatively simple dive site, follow the reef around the island. My plan was to get ahead of where i think they would be and then turn around to bump into them at some point. It was about 20 mins or so before that happened.
I saw a solitary sea tulip with a fish feeding around the base. I headed over to investigate when a little flash of colour caught my eye. It was a clingfish that settled on the stem of the sea tulip.
When you start diving with PADI you learn underwater hand signals like, OK, going up, going down etc. When you are looking for macro subjects its slightly different, you have someone like Kim that has eagle eyes for spotting the smallest of critters, and you have me that went and bought a magnifying glass to help him see. Kim patiently showed me this nudibranch with eggs. She was laughing as I tried to pretend to be Sherlock Holmes investigating the area. I saw the eggs (not actually knowing they were eggs) so framed the shot and took the image. After the dive at the car park, she asked if i saw the pink nudibranch. Erm.....what pink nudibranch? I downloaded my images and was fortunate that the depth of field i used in the image had the nudibranch in sharp focus. This is literally a centimetre at most, so surely I can be forgiven for my blindness.
In identifying the nudibranch I posted toy Nudibranch Central on Facebook, Gary Cobb says, "This aeolid was called Trinchesia or Cuthona then Gosliner wrote a paper and placed them under Tenellia. There was a recent paper that wants to put them back and we are waiting for Gosliners rebuttal, meanwhile we go by Tenellia."
With the nudbranch image captured, we headed on to a section of reef with a nice soft coral/sponge section. The hand signal for pygmy was given and I knew we were where we wanted to be. I spotted in my torch beam, then turned it off as the bright light can make them turn away from you. Instead I switched the red light focus light of my strobe on. It's a patience game, of choosing your spot focus point, taking some test shots to get the light directed right and with appropriate power, then wait for it to move into the zone. I will happily spend a long time just waiting, watching and generally enjoying the moment, but when the action happens I squeeze the shutter button. I pretty much know I have the shot when I take it, you want the eye looking at you and that being where the spot focus is targeting. With image captured I left to look for the others.
The next subject Kim found was a painted angler fish. These are fairly small critters and can be on the top of the reef or tucked into the side. This one was about a foot off the floor and wedged into the reef with some weedy substrate partly covering him. There wasn't a huge amount of room to manoeuvre so I was limited to the shot I could get. I use a nauticam housing with a 45 degree viewfinder which allows me to have the camera point up but still see the subject even though the camera is on the sand.
Kim and Eddie's air was getting low so they headed back to shore, I decided to carry on looking out for new subjects. You don't always see something new, you hope, and search and sometimes you get rewarded. The nudibranch collection continues to grow and it was further added to with this one Hypselodoris obscura. Not sure what it is about finding a new species for the collection but ironically on the Sunday I saw 2 more. Not the first time it's happened,
After 2 hours I was done for the day, I surfaced and exited the water and walked back up the hill. Kim and Eddie had kindly waited for me and we chatted about what we saw. I was happy to get the pygmy image, until Kim asked "which one did you get the cream one or the green/yellow one?". Damn ! I only saw the one, looks like I am coming back tomorrow to find it.
Tomorrow (Sunday) came and I got back in the water and headed round to where we found the first one. It felt warm in the water to begin with, but as you turned south the temperature really dropped. This wasn't helped by my dry-suit being a little leaky in the feet and also the neck and wrist seals needing replacing. That being said I had my big boy pants on and knew my objective. I found the spot, and easily found both. They were being rather camera shy today, lots of bum pictures. I spent a long time there waiting, waiting waiting and then snap snap. Yesterdays pygmy pipehorse had moved a little to the left and closer to a piece of sponge/coral which was a nice composition. The cream pygmy pipehorse I wanted with more contrast against a black background.
Mission accomplished !!