This weekend I have joined some friends to dive the Coolooli. The shipwreck is a bucket dredge that was sunk in 1980 as an artificial reef and now lays at 48msw.
Trip from the Coolooli to Rose Bay Wharf plotted on a map
The wreck location is roughly in front of dee-why beach, in the northern suburbs of Sydney. It is a great spot for technical divers to train and have a great start of the day.
I usually dive on the Scubaroo, the boat owned and manned by our French friend Yves, one of the funniest skippers in Sydney. The ride to the site takes about 45 minutes, as it is approximately 8 miles away from the pickup point at Rose Bay Wharf. The boat normally leaves at 6:45 in the morning, so I usually have to mind the drinks on Friday night.
The trip to the site is stunning, with the sun rising on the horizon and the sight of the heads while going outside of the Sydney Harbour.
The dive is always good, even when it is murky at the surface. The bottom rarely has less than 8 meters visibility (I have dived there at least 5 times and never got less than that) with average 15 meters. As the wreck has been cleaned before sinking there are heaps of space for penetration. You can easily get in at the bottom and make your way through the wreck to exit close to the line at the shallowest point around 36 meters.
Due to the depths, I dive and recommend divers to use Trimix. Also, as decompression is required, proper tech diving training is strongly recommended. Further to this, the use of a dry suit is a good idea as the dive run time can be as much as one hour on 16oC water during the summer (it was 14oC at the bottom yesterday)
You can find more information about the Coolooli on the Michael McFayden website, which is a great source of general information about Sydney diving.
Also, I have embedded below a video from Andrew Cronan that was shot with the DiveFrontier crew. These guys are a group of GUE certified divers in Sydney who are involved in a number of interesting diving projects. But this is a topic for a future post… 🙂