Welcome to Total Bottom Time!

Total Bottom Time is my online personal dive log. A place where I can share my dives with friends, family, other divers, and the world. You can find out a bit more about me and see my full log of dives by clicking on my profile on the right. Feel free to subscribe to my dives via email or RSS.

Below are just some of my latest dives.

Great dive but I'll skip to the best part. At the very end of the dive, we were headed back to shore and came across a couple of other divers hanging out at the surface looking down so we started looking down too. At first I didn't spot it but after 10-15 seconds of staring, I saw an octopus strolling through the weeds on the way back to its den. My first octopus sighting in New Zealand.

It was only about 3-4 metres down and there was considerable surge. I had to fight to stay at depth but managed to keep my camera on the octopus the whole time. I was glad I didn't spook it and it calmly and naturally went about its return to its den. I only wish I had arrived a few minutes earlier to catch its whole trek. Either way it's great to see an octopus in the marine reserve!

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The second dive of the day produced no new crayfish but no matter. Time to feast! I dropped the rock lobsters off with some great friends, one of whom is something of a chef. She wanted to try something new and decided to do 1 as sashimi, 2 as lobster thermidor, and the rest were grilled. I couldn’t get enough of the sashimi and thermidor. Just an amazing ending to a great day.

Lobster Sashimi

Lobster Sashimi

Lobster Thermidor Before

Lobster Thermidor After

Grilled Lobster

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My first dive of the season was a crayfish catch. It was a great day for it, the only thing missing was the sun. We got out good and early and had launched the boat by 8:30 am. 

I descended on Thoms Rock to a depth of about 26m and began to hunt.  Nothing. Absolutely nothing for the first 10 minutes. Then I found it, a lobster bonanza!

There they were in a (very large) “bucket” shaped rock formation. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m used to seeing them in warrens and caves under reefs where they can quickly escape and hide from predators. In this bucket shaped rock formation, they had nowhere to go except up.

With that in mind, I opened my catch bag and descended on the nest with the bag above the rock formation to catch any that might try to go straight up. However, once they sensed me, all they did was cling to the side of the “bucket”. 

Now all I had to do was pick the crays off the side. I lost count of how many I was stuffing in the catch bag. In my excitement I burned through ...

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