Dom Buyers goes Spearfishing in Akaroa

Since the beginning of the dive season, my eye has largely been drawn towards the simplicity and freedom of spearfishing. A lot of my spare time has been spent researching spots, looking over marine charts, researching gear, and of course, getting in the water!

This particular journey took me out to Akaroa on the inside of the harbour.
Opting for a shore dive this time around, my dive buddy and I started the swim out to the area of rocky reef where we’d previously scored a feed. The first half hour or so provided us with plenty to see, but not a lot to bring home. Lots of Moki were spotted, but none that would have surpassed the legal catch limit of 40cm. Thankfully, this wasn’t the story for the rest of the day.

Hunting the relative shallows, between 5-7 metres, I managed to secure my first fish, a butterfish measuring just shy of 60cm (still my personal best for this species).

Next up came a much more surprising catch for the area, a decent sized Kahawai. Luck was undoubtedly on my side with this shot, as I’d descended almost directly on top of the fish, which was sitting in about 9 metres of water.
Despite only having an additional 5cm of length over the butterfish, the Kahawhai put up a much greater fight, something I wasn’t used to for a smaller fish.
Nevertheless I hauled it to the surface and secured the catch. It was good timing, as a large short-tailed stingray cruised up to me, looking for a free meal!

The evening was drawing to a close so my buddy and I decided we would aim for one more fish each then call it a night. I dropped down into some deeper water, surrounded by long kelp strands, and sure enough locked eyes with a school of Blue Moki. Lining up the biggest of the bunch, I took my shot, and added that to the days catch as well.

With the head Torches on, we cooked up a feed and packed up our gear, and after marking out the spots for next time, headed home for a well-deserved rest.

Easter 2021 Dive Trip to Poor Knights and Bay of Islands

If you asked divers where one of the places in New Zealand that they wanted to dive is, people normally say either Poor knight Islands or Fiordland.

We decided to choose the Poor Knights and 9 divers from Christchurch meet at Auckland airport where we had arranged transport north to Russel. On our way north we experienced the Auckland traffic delays, had a flat tyre before making it to Northland Dive where we would be based.

Everyone was excited about the next 5 days of diving we had ahead of us. The plan for the first two days of the trip was to dive locally from the Northland Dive base which included, the wreck of the Canterbury and local northland reefs.

The obvious difference from diving around Christchurch and Banks Peninsular (apart from visibility) was the fish life.  You could see the big Snapper from the boat and when you entered the water, we saw schools of Blue Mao Moa and Kingfish cruising past. The first dive was a check out dive. This was an opportunity to make sure all our gear was feeling good and fine tuning our weights and dive setup. We had two divers using side mount equipment and everyone else on single tank setup.

The Canterbury is a fantastic shipwreck which sits upright on the ocean floor making navigation around the wreck relatively easy. For those that have been on one of the Dive HQ Trips to the Mikhail Lermontov can relate to this as everything on the Lermontov is on its side.

The best thing about the Canterbury Shipwreck is that it was sunk for divers and has made an awesome artificial reef attracting fish life all around it. We ended up diving the Canterbury twice and on the second day this was one of my most enjoyable dives of the trip, we started at the stern and heading towards the bow swimming along the length of the wreck through one of the corridors on deck level 2.

On the morning of day three we got aboard the Sea Spy, where we were to spend the next 3 days diving off and sleeping on the boat at the Poor Knight Islands. As we arrived at the islands the fish life had gone up another two notches, seeing bigger Snapper, trevally mouthing on the surface and big schools of Blue all seen from the surface.

Once we entered the water you soon realised why this was one of Jacques Cousteau’s top 10 dive locations in the world. Each dive offered something unique and memorable. Blue Maomao Arch, where massive schools of Maomao just sit forming a fish arch, massive drop offs into deep blue water where if you are as lucky as Steve, Mark and Morne you will see a shark cruise underneath you. Cathedral Cave, where you see large groups of fish huddled inside and a whale jaw sitting at the back of the cave. This dive was very memorable for the fact that when Paul and I left the cave entrance we got caught up in massive schools of Blue and Pink Maomao, Demoiselle, and bait fish while on the fridge were Snapper, Kingfish and Trevally. All this was happening at 5m to the surface.

In all we completed 11 dives at the Poor Knight Islands and 4 dives around the Northland dive base. For me personally though by far the best dive of the trip was diving the Northern Arch. What made it so special was the sting rays that were stacked up about 10 deep moving backwards and forwards under the arch. This is an occurrence that happens every 4 to 6 years and the stingrays will be there for about 3 months. Unfortunately, the photos do not give the dive its full justice.

I cannot wait to return for our next trip booked from 28th September through to 4th October. Who wants to join us?

See you out diving soon,

Cheers

Richard

NEW – Shearwater Teric Dive Computer

The Shearwater Teric computer was released today and will again redefine the dive computer market.

If you are a technical diver you will already know of the Shearwater Petrel and Perdex AI. Now the Shearwater Teric will also soon be known by recreational divers and freedivers.

Scuba Gear and Dive HQ Christchurch have pre-orders in, and waiting on delivery of this well awaited dive computer which was released to the media and dive industry today. Shipping of stock will be limited at first, but production of the Teric will be continuous to meet the dive computers worldwide demand.

 

The Teric has all the features scuba divers have come to love in all the other Shearwater computers and they have also added more. It is our most compact unit, yet it is also our most feature rich unit. The Teric comes with AMOLED full colour display that is very easy to read even in adverse conditions.

The Teric has 4 buttons. Shearwater have applied situationally adaptable logic to our menus and buttons making the Teric very intuitive. It is also very configurable. You can configure one of the 4 buttons to give you a single press access to different tools like compass, stopwatch, countdown timer, etc.

It is a full air integrated dive computer compatible and can monitor up to two pressure transmitters in two different tanks. It has Recreational, Gauge, OC Tech and CC/BO modes with up to 5 Trimix and nitrox gases. But it also has an all new Freediving mode with configurable sampling/ logging rates and improved ascent and descent indicators. There are haptic and audible alarms that can be disabled to prevent annoying other divers in the vicinity.

The Shearwater Teric uses a wirelessly rechargeable battery and ships with a wireless inductive charger. Add to this the Shearwater Bluetooth communications protocol for downloading logs and updating firmware and you have a fully enclosed unit with reduced flooding risks since the user will never need to open it up to connect a cable or change a battery.
Like the NERD 2, the battery can be replaced at one of our authorized service centres. We expect battery life to be 5 years.

 

Finally, Shearwater have also built it up with a robust hardware set with plenty of room for firmware improvements and new features