AUSTRALIA: SEA DRAGONS
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"Dragons, mate? You want to be out at Rapid Bay. You want to hire some dive gear? Might have something to fit you."
Half an hour later my wife and I were kitted-out and had a sketch map of a dragon's lair scribbled on a paper napkin. "Oy, mate! You'll need this." The dive show owner thrust a heavy porter's luggage trolley at us. "Good luck!" The need for the luggage trolley became obvious when we arrived at Rapid Bay. There was a pier about a kilometer long. The dragons were to be found at the far end. |
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Wearing ill-fitting wetsuits and armed only with a camera we trundled to the end of the pier. The search for dragons was on.
When you imagine diving in Australia, you instantly conjure up images of the tropical Great Barrier Reef. The diving there is fantastic but it is little known outside Australian diving circles that there is some fantastic cold water diving to be had. Cold was the operative word for us on the particular day.
Although it was August, it was, of course the Australian winter, and we were diving a few kilometres east of Adelaide on the south coast.
A jump of a few metres into the icy waters above that our paper serviette guaranteed was the haunt of the exotic dragon revealed at about fifteen metres of visibility and the legs of the pier encrusted in brilliant coloured sponges and soft corals. There were juvenile puffer fish and heaps of gaudy nudibranchs. A photographers paradise, but no dragons.
After half-an-hour my ever tolerant buddy, my wife Louise, tugged my find and gave the sign for "I'm freezing." I replied with the traditional response of "Five minutes more," and returned to photographing a particular juicy nudibranch. Another tug at the fin, and I turned, expecting the "I'm divorcing you " sign. There, pointed out by a wide-eyed and slightly hyperventilating Louise were three Leafy Sea Dragons.
What can I tell you about Leafy Sea Dragons? Well they are in the same family of fish as seahorses. They are slow moving and hide in seaweed, hence the bizarre fins. They are only found off the coast of Southern Australia and Tasmania. They share one other trait with seahorses in that it is there males that get pregnant.
Worth getting cold for, wasn't it?
JF