Jervis Bay

Last weekend we headed down to Jervis Bay, Just South of Sydney, to do some diving. We booked another stay through AirBnB, and other than our host being exhaustingly chatty, it was a good stay.

This isn't us, just some randoms on the beach

We weren't bothered to get there early, so we had a slow Saturday and arrived at about 2pm. After dropping out things at our accommodation we headed into Booderee National Park to do a little coastal walk. Entry into the park is $11 but this is valid for a 48 hour period, so it's about the same as any other New South Wales National Park. The park is actually pretty small and there are only two walks of any great length. We did the Munyunga Waranga walk which is a pretty easy 1.5 - 2 hours. Part of the walk is through heath scrub and we saw plenty of small birds flying around. The best part is the short length that follows the coast line and gives you wonderful views of the cliffs along to the ruins of the Cape St George Lighthouse. Which, from a distance, Brandon through was a giant crocodile statue... You can continue your walk all the way to the lighthouse, but we were short on daylight hours and so we drove over to take some photos as the sun set. Unfortunately much of the lighthouse was demolished, but it's still a pretty cool site. There are signs that tell of the past unlucky residents, a lot of whom died prematurely from disease or accidents.

On Sunday we got up early and headed into Huskinson to leave for our double boat dive. One of the main attractions of diving in Jervis Bay is the possibility of diving with fur seals, because there is a colony there. I assume that any time the seas allow it they head out there first, so we went out of the bay and up the coast a little to attempt a dive with the seals. The coast line is very impressive, with high cliffs and sea caves carved out by the waves. We saw two groups of fishermen who had abseiled down the cliffs to fish from small rock shelves. Unfortunately the seals didn't want to dive with us, so our first dive was quite dull because there wasn't a lot of life there. Thankfully, we moved back into the bay for our second dive. This one was so much more interesting and fun, with heaps of swim through (small caves that you swim through). My ears were a nuisance but they didn't stop me, thankfully. I may have forced my way through the first swim through, even though my ears were hurting because they wouldn't equalise. We'll keep that just between us though. I had heaps of fun on this dive and wished we hadn't bothered going out to the seals. When I was booking the dive, I was a bit disappointed there was only one dive shop in Jervis Bay, but it meant there were only two dive boats out that day. So it was much better than the four or more out when we were at Fish Rock Cave. There seemed to be more divers in the water there than sharks. The dive shop is also super organised and were really good all round I thought. I took an antihistamine in the morning before we left and used Sudafed nasal spray before the first dive and between dives. I'm not entirely sure if that helped, because after I used it my ears squealed as I equalised. Next time I'm going to try again without it because I'm nursing some pretty achy sinuses now.

We got back to shore at about 2pm, so we had a quick bite of fish and chips and went for a look at the famous Hyams Beach - The whitest sand in the world. Even though it was getting close to sunset, the beach was still full of people. So that kind of made it hard to appreciate it. I have read of other people being there on a long weekend and having the beach almost to themselves. I guess we just picked the wrong long weekend. It's certainly nice and the sand is certainly very white. It's probably a lot easier to love it in summer when it's hot. We were wrecked after our day out in the cold diving so we didn't do anything that night.

We felt like there wasn't a whole lot more to do in the area, so even though I had thought we would stay until lunch time on Monday, we headed off after breakfast. We drove up the coast way so that we could drive over the Sea Cliff Bridge. There are some amazing photos of it on the internet that I now realise must have been taken from a helicopter. The second photo is taken from a lookout point, just before you enter Royal National Park after driving over the bridge. I'm pretty disappointed with my photos from the weekend in general. They're pretty ho-hum and if I saw them I wouldn't think Jervis Bay was worth visiting. I also don't have any photos of the diving, because the go-pro takes pretty terrible photos at depth and the video may not ever make its way to the internet.