Saturday I was able to escape from the house and go for a dive at a location in South Australia called ‘The Bluff’ near Victor Harbor.

There is a small little jetty, more of a landing really, with a few entry options including a rocky wave entry into the surge, a climb down the jetty ladder or a rocky entry and long surface swim from the small adjacent bay.

I have have a love hate relationship with this place. On a good day it is nothing short of amazing with gorgeous kelp gardens covering an underwater granite boulder wonderland. Leafy sea dragons swim among the kelp while curious sea lions do their best to entertain or scare you depending on how you react to something very large and not your dive buddy coming up from behind you.

On a bad day, even a day that looks good from the surface, you can rapidly find yourself in a surgy and disorienting mess of particulate soup with visibility down to less than one meter. Sometimes it is bad enough to make you sick from a horizontal vertigo (is that horizontigo?).

Saturday’s dive came in at about 10%. Not the worst dive ever here but pretty ugly once we got around to the kelp gardens. The silver lining after abandoning the surgy pea soup was the lovely gentle diving within the shelter of the bay watching herring cale play in the sea grass.

This gorgeous view of The Bluff belies the real condition below but we still had a wonderful afternoon both below and above the water.