Another great boat dive aboard Shadowfax with Poor Knights Divers, www.pkdive.co.nz, out from Tutukaka on 27 Jan 07.  Martin had made some refinements to the boat making for a better dive platform.  Conditions were essentially flat for another three-dive day at the Knights, with the last dive on dusk. Visibility was around 15 m with a maximum depth of 26 m.  The water was a balmy 18°C.  Wade Doak and his lovely wife Jan were on board and were happy to share their vast knowledge of the Knights, marine biology, a few stories and just a little philosophy with the other divers.  For many this experience alone will make going out with PK Dive a must.  Wade has inspired me to start thinking about transmitting live images from a buoy-mounted camera to the mainland (maybe the www).  It’s been a few years since I have played with video transmission and the technology has moved forward in leaps and bounds since then.  There will be more on this in due course. 

I completed three great dives, two accompanied by Jamie, one of the PK Dive crew.  With my camera all set to go I was looking forward to some serious nudibranch photography.  Just a few shots into the first dive the camera card gave up the ghost with a memory card error message and the camera locked on.  Darn!  Nothing to do but enjoy the dive.

During the surface interval I set about resetting the camera and reformatting the card.  Alas on the second dive the camera pretended to let me take pictures for about 20 minutes before going haywire again.  This was a jolly bother because I thought I’d snapped an awesome packhorse cray and several lock lobsters, the first crays that I’d seen at the Knights.  The best I’ve been able to do is to recover some of the thumbnail images.

On the third dive, and with nothing to loose I reset the camera and turned it to movie mode.  The memory card failed again and I got no visual memories at all from the dive.

Two other equipment problems became apparent on the third dive.  My dive watch had started to fog inside the glass, and when I needed my torch it refused to turn on despite fresh batteries.  I suspect that these items had taken a pounding on my previous dive trip in the huge surge and the faults were only now becoming evident.  It was off to the jewelers, the memory card shop and some time at the service bench the following week.

So there are hardly any photos of note to share from this dive-day folks, but I have my dive log and my memories

Click on the thumbs to view the full-sized images.