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.

One of the house reef's literally across the street from Dive Wellington is known as Mermaid's Kitchen. It's in a marine reserve so it's in great shape. A lot of wild life and plant life to be found. The weather was phenomenal and the visibility was great.

Shortly after swimming past the rocks you see above, we look a left turn and came across these blue moki fish feeding in the kelp.

Blue moki

Later on there were a number of swim-throughs we did. We ran into some crayfish on some of them.

Swim-through

Finally, towards the end of the dive, we discovered a collection of squid eggs! The seemed awfully exposed to predators to me but they appeared to be untouched.

Squid eggs

Great day for a shore dive.

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It's been a winter since my last dive and I've got some new gear and some recently repaired gear. It was past time to get in the water and test things out. An easy shore dive is a good opportunity for that.

The equipment was:

• A metric Mares Mission 2C Gauge. I needed a pressure guage in metric since, naturally, that's what everyone in New Zealand uses and the compass is really nice to have.
• A hose elbow on my Halcyon BCD (ruptured on a previous dive) in need of a stress test. 
• A battery replacement in my ancient Cressi EDY dive computer in need of a soak test.
• A new amount of weight in need of a buoyancy test.

Everything came through the testing just fine. I really need to figure out how to make proper use of the compass. I can't even remember how to take a bearing.

The dive itself was pretty unremarkable as the conditions weren't very good and the visibility was poor. However, we came across the perfectly hollow shell of a crayfish that had very recently molted. 

The exoskeleton looked alive as the water flowed around it causing the ...

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During our surface interval we were visited by a fairly large, white bird. The picture doesn't quite do it justice but it was interesting nonetheless.

Bird

For our second dive of the morning we descended on the bow of the F69. When we got to the bottom, more cod we're waiting for us! I could spend an entire dive just playing with these fish. They're a handsome looking fish and have a lot of personality.

Cod

Blue cod

Eventually we moved on and toured the rest of the wreck.

F69

 

There were even a couple of spots where we could do an easy swim through of the wreck. 

F69

After our bottom time was finished we headed back to surface where we discovered a southerly wind had finally moved in. The swells we're probably 10 ft high at times. It definitely made getting back on board interesting. Once everybody had finally crawled their way back aboard, we turned tail and headed back to the shore. 

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