Despite having completed almost 800 dives in Sydney (at the time I wrote this article), I have only done a couple of dozen north of Sydney Harbour and of these, only four or five have been on reefs. We decided on this trip to concentrate on reef dives, especially as a couple of the divers with us were not really interested in diving deep (as all but two of the wrecks are over 40 metres deep).

The third dive we did on this trip was at a location off Bangally Head which is located to the south of Whale Beach. On Easter Sunday the seas were absolutely flat, millpond, so we made the decision to dive this site as a drift dive. We entered the water to the north-west of the point (GPS Marks of 33° 37' 32S 151° 20' 34"E using datum AUS66 - read my GPS Page about datums) and dived towards the south-east.

This site consists of two pinnacles, one of which just breaks the surface. Hence its alternate name, The Twins (given by Jim Foyel of Scuba Shack Charters).

The depth was not great, no more than 18 metres at any point on the dive. At the start the reef was slightly sloping, with a few small boulders on the reef and a couple of bigger boulders on the sand. In this area we found a number of sea dragons and the sponges on the rock were quite good.

As we proceeded along we saw a lot of fishlife, including bream, trevally, seapike and yellowtail. As we approached the very end of the point, the terrain changed quite spectacularly. Instead of the bigger boulders, there were a large number of huge boulders (The Pinnacles) that reached right up to about five metres. The fishlife amongst the giant rocks was amazing, with enormous quantities of silver sweep, seapike, big eyes, yellowtail, red morwong and other fish that swayed in the slight surge. There were a lot of excellent swim-throughs and small caves as well and outside a couple of them were wobbegongs.

We weaved in and out of the swim-throughs and in between the boulders. This was a great dive, with good visibility making the dive even betters. We spent a considerable amount of time in this area and we only finished the dive because we could see the winds had come up on the water's surface and it would be a long, slow trip back if we stayed down longer. It was with great reluctance that we ascended after 60 minutes.

You can dive this with Scuba Shack Charters, Google them.