Forays into Travel Blogging: Exmouth Navy Pier

Y'all. First things first I'm the realest (That's a line from a song and I can't help myself). But actually first things first: the Navy Pier in Exmouth is one of the top shore diving sites in Australia. Before Cyclone Vance hit Exmouth in 1999 (at the time it was the strongest cyclone to make landfall in Australia) and smashed it to bits the pier was one of the top 10 shore dive sites in the world. Since then it's had to re-establish its ecosystem, but it's still utterly remarkable.

The site itself is right near the tip of the Exmouth peninsula, where the Indian Ocean meets the Exmouth Gulf. Two currents converge there, the Leeuwin and the Ningaloo. That convergence is the main reason we have such extraordinary diversity of marine life (of all sizes!) here: the Leeuwin brings warm tropical water down and the Ningaloo brings cooler water up, so both bring different marine species. The Ningaloo Reef that fringes the west side of the peninsula and continues south is the longest "fringing reef" in the world. The Barrier Reef out east gets all kinds of attention because it's so large, but you have to travel 40km off shore to see it! The Ningaloo, in comparison, is directly off the coast. At its closest point, it's only 200 meters off shore: easily accessed while snorkeling. So not only does it boast whalesharks, humpback whales, orcas, sea turtles, manta rays, etc., but you can also see all those things without having to hire a boat to take you out! So all that is to say that the Ningaloo Reef, right here in Exy, is extraordinary. But the Navy Pier is a microcosm of that diverse marine life because it provides one very protected spot for all these gorgeous critters to call home.

My diving life down in Perth was particularly rich because of the extensive shore diving opportunities. Those were nearly all located at man-made sites that provided artificial reef: jetties, sea walls, marinas. Places where sea life can find some protection from the whims of the ocean. So those sites end up being densely populated with the kinds of creatures that already live nearby. The Navy Pier, then, is a similar structure that just happens to be located in a place that is already SO RICH in marine life. So it ends up being this absolutely extraordinary aquarium, showing a range of the diversity of life here in one small site. It's magic, y'all.

I have been fortunate enough to spend nearly 4 hours exploring it underwater, and I can't even express how utterly inadequate that time is. There is just so much to see. Schools of fish, tiny sea slugs called nudibranchs that can be smaller than your pinky fingernail or as long as your palm, Goliath Grouper fish that can weigh 500+ pounds, sharks, octopus, fish that stand out for their nearly fluorescent colors and others that you hardly see for their camoflage. And all of it is on this man-made structure that fortunate scuba divers are allowed to visit.

A few weeks back I got to dive it with an event called the Sea Slug Census (say that 5x fast) that was meant to try and get a snapshot, over a long weekend, of the types of nudibranchs that are currently living and thriving here. Because nudis only live for a handful of years, they're meant to be a good bellweather species for determining the health of an ecosystem and the current conditions. Varieties that prefer different food sources, temperatures, sea conditions give scientists insight into what's happening in an area; a species that was thriving a few years back might not even be present anymore, due to changes in the conditions, but other species will have come in to replace them. So the census is a way for scientists to track what's going on, and for citizen scientists to get involved with recording that info. Because I don't have an underwater camera at the moment, one of the divemasters who was working the day I dived lent me his and he just sent me some of the photos! So without further ado: some of the critters I saw on the Navy Pier two weeks ago!