Profile: diving diva
Sarah Speight, 18 Sep 2013.
SCUBA diver Sarah Speight is relatively new to the sport but has taken to it, well, like a fish to water. She's glimpsed many unusual marine life during five years of diving in New South Wales and Victoria. Here she describes her favourite sightings that she logged on Redmap!
Warty Prowfish
During my Open Water Dive course, my instructor showed me a warty prowfish (Aetapcus maculatus) at Pope's Eye in Victoria and told me it was a lucky find. I spent the next three years trying to find it again. Finally I managed to find this one (pictured left), which I took a few photos of before it waddled away. It's still one of the strangest-looking fish I have seen in Victoria!
Stout moray couple
I found this stout moray couple (Gymnothorax eurostus) outside Fish Rock Cave, a renouned dive spot a few hours north of Sydney, NSW. It made for a cute photo and I named them Greg and Sheila after friends of mine. They appeared to be fighting or playing with each other most of the time (the morays, not my friends, that is!).
Hawksbill turtle
This was my second trip to Fish Rock Cave and the second time I found a Hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata) inside the cave. I wonder if it was the same turtle that I saw the year before? One thing I enjoy about diving is that I get to know where different marine life live and go check on how they are doing each time I dive that site. Later on, I even got to see this turtle swim around. But most of the time it was content to rest on the rocks in the cave.
Stout moray
The visibility on this dive was awful due to flooding that had affected the area near Fish Rock Cave. So I spent most of the dive peering into crevices to find macro critters to take photos of. This stout moray (Gymnothorax eurostus) appeared above some shells and gave me a fright! Most of the morays I have found at Fish Rock are Green Morays (Gymnothorax prasinus) so it was nice to find a different species this time.
Short Boarfish
This was the second time I've spotted a short boarfish (Parazanclistius hutchinsi) near the Mornington Pier in Victoria and both times on a night dive - just two years apart. It's an unusual sighting as this fish isn't often spotted in this area. When I took this photo, there was a group of them hanging out at the end of the pier. They were approachable and did not swim away when I produced my camera - so an easily photographed fish!
Sarah Speight is a Redmap member and has logged 9 sightings on Redmap NSW and Redmap Victoria.
(Text edited by Yvette Barry)
