Victoria has some beautiful diving – caves, kelp forests, soft corals, shipwrecks and seals just to name a few attractions. We have sampled only a few dives sites here, but there is one that we keep coming back to – Flinders Pier.
The reason? Well, the title and the photos sum this up…. It’s a really great place to come face to face with the most magical of fish, the weedy seadragon.
For those who’ve never heard of a “weedy”, it is a relative of the seahorse, a member of the syngnathid family. The weedy can get to about thirty centimetres long, so is much larger than most seahorses. They are slow swimmers, and rely on looking very much like a patch of seagrass to avoid predators.
Rosie with two weedy seadragons
We were delighted to see a number of pregnant male seadragons on our dives here. If you look at the top picture, you can see the eggs, like purple baubles, on the underside of the dragons tail. In a seadragons world, it is the male who carries the babies until they hatch. If you want to make as many babies as possible, this kind of makes sense…. because as soon as the female transfers her batch of eggs to the male, she can get on with making the next lot without delay.
Not only did we find dragons, but we also bumped into a friend underwater, Brian Deakin. Scott and I have a habit of bumping into friends like this ? So we continued diving with Brian and his wife Chris for the weekend and also caught up above water over lunch at Flinders.
Flinders from above
Next stop… Wilson’s Promontory for some scenery and wildlife!