February 2026 Dive Club Newsletter.
Looking back on January, we’re reminded of the fact that our sunburnt country is very much a land of contrasts with record heat, flash floods and fires all at once…
We were closed on the last week of January as we escaped to take a breather and recharge the batteries following a busy start to the year.
Our escape took us back to our happy place of Kangaroo Island where years ago we used to run annual club dive trips both on a live-aboard called the Falie, a historic tall ship that would sail the North coast and provide us with some amazing diving in remote locations, and when the Falie stopped it’s operations, we were running land based tours for numerous years doing shore dives.
Nowadays, diving at Kangaroo Island is difficult, there’s only one place that does air fills, you never know when they’re open or closed and more often than not, the quality of the air fills is somewhat dubious, so we take our own compressor with us to enable us to dive where and when we want.
Unfortunately this year we didn’t get as much diving as we usually get due to larger than normal swells, strong winds, but what is disappointing is what we saw underwater at King Georges’ beach where the underwater reef was covered in a black algeal slime, there was very little fish life about, marine invertebrates were non existent, but an encouraging site was some new growth of sea grass.
Another site at Snellings was somewhat more encouraging with some invertebrate life around (Vercose Nudibranchs and a couple of Sea Hares), no Weedy or Leafy sea dragons were encountered on any dive, we attempted 2 dives at Western River, one that we aborted due to the swell and lack of visibility, the other provided us with about 8mts vis, a thumping longshore current with a pleasing level of marine life encountered, Eastern Blue Groupers both adult and juvenile, blue throated wrasses, long snouted boarfish, sweep, again some invertebrate life, still no sea dragons of any shape, but on our swim back the sad encounter of a male Shaws’ Cowfish with clear sufferance from the algeal bloom showing with skin discolouration, and only one functioning eye left.
The upside is that it appears that the effects of the algeal bloom are on their way out in some locations but South Australia is far from being out of the woods yet…
Reports are that the entire Leafy Sea dragon population of the Kingscote Jetty have been wiped out and that there is zero re-colonisation of the species a year on from the initial detection of toxic algae, sufferance is still occurring at various locations around the Yorke and Eyre peninsula with many dive sites completely void of marine life, aquaculture ventures wiped out such as oyster and muscle farms and toxic sea foam appearing at beaches… We can only hope that the devastation hasn’t impacted Whyalla’s giant annual cuttlefish aggregation too badly and that these amazing creatures will return in numbers this coming Winter.
From a club perspective, we’ve seen a pleasing jump in the number of divers joining us on our weekly guided club dives as well as a near full boat of Early Bird Renewed dive club members on the boat dive of 28 February.