For those of you not yet initiated, muck diving involves swimming exceptionally slowly along the ocean floor. Spectacular fans, gorgeous corals and brightly coloured fish are not an integral part of the scenery.
Having said that, our muck dive at Lawadi, North Milne Bay this morning ended with a long swim back around an underwater headland over acres of pristine coral, as the boat was parked on Deakins Reef around the corner.
The first half hour was a familiar Muck Dive, a brown rubble-strewn slope, apparently devoid of life. That’s until my focus came down to the really small stuff. Not far along the slope, Alex is shouting underwater, not an easy feat, but he practises a lot and is an expert. Several divers respond instantly and swim toward the nondescript patch of slope in front of his large camera. With a metal pointer, he indicates a minuscule dot in the mud, our first nudibranch. With my brand-new bifocal mask, I can actually see it for once. I make a mental note to ask to see the massively enlarged image on his computer screen later, so I can truly appreciate what I saw.
One by one the divers disperse away from the nudibranch. We spread ourselves out, so five of us hang parallel to the slope, faces a few cms above the rubble. Alex is the nearest to me, his wetsuit encompassing a hood, giving him the appearance of being in underwater stealth mode. His country of birth gives us leeway to rib him about being a Russian spy.
We are lucky enough to eventually discover a seahorse, drifting across the slope, moving like a piece of floating debris, so as to not draw attention to itself, a common ploy of critters found in muck sites. After a while, as often happens on these dives, I spot dead leaves mimicking leafy scorpionfish, halameda seaweed posing as halameda ghost pipefish and numerous other shapes protruding from the slope pretending to be something interesting.
To break such excitement, I’m lucky enough to discover a mimic octopus on the hunt. I watch it sitting on the spot with the ends of its tentacles probing invisible channels in the sand. It moves along a few cms and tries again, its body rearranged into the head and a surrounding shirt. This octopus when threatened will flee, its tentacles re-shaped to resemble a flounder.
The muck dive deteriorates into pristine reef for the swim back, though the water is murky from run-off and the visibility is poor. The reef scenery unfolds, emerging out of the inky water, like mountain scenery on a misty day. I’m not joking when I say – it’s stunning.