Monday Morning Dive

When it comes to hunting a feed underwater on scuba, it is pretty hard to beat this time of year from mid spring through until Christmas.

I’d experienced some particularly spectacular vis, fish life and really good cray hunting at the Mercs diving with some clients lately, and with a gap in the calendar and some beaut weather I invited good mate and filmmaker Mike Bhana up for a bit of extreme diving to kick the week off, exploring a new bit of deep foul Id never dived before.

No such thing as the Monday morning blues here in Tairua! 8.30 am right on high tide Monday morning and the heart was beating fast as we ascended down a wall, a building current pushed us swiftly along the bottom of a drop off in 20m. The scene was like something out of a sci fi movie when we hit the bottom with big bugs crawling all over the sandy bottom at the base of the weed line. Two bucks stood and and scrapped each other oblivious to the two divers ready to fill their catch bags. 1, 2, 3. 9 minutes in we had our limit each and absolutely no more room, these were XOS packhorse Crays.

We took our time to slowly finning back into the current along the weed line to our anchor, with plenty of maccies, Koheru, goat fish and mao mao to entertain the senses on the way back to the boat. Surfacing from a dive like that as most people are getting to work...priceless! And with a bit of air left in the tanks we rounded the morning off with a quick drop for some scallops before shooting home to Tairua for lunch.

Lots of people talk about packies being average eating, but I find them, fresh, to be even better chewing than reds. Big fat juicy legs, chunks of popcorn packie, mmmm doesn’t get much better!