Snorkeling in 2013

[Alright I'm a bit behind again, so just for the sake of posting what I've already written, I'm going to skip New Year's Eve (NYE) for the moment and jump to NYD briefly. I'll post NYE as soon as I get a chance.]

New Year’s Day I did my first official Australian snorkeling bout since 2009…actually the first snorkeling since then, which is crazy (I’ve been spending all my time in landlocked places, lol). I went to Coogee again, but around the corner from the main beach to Gordon’s Bay, which was supposed to be good for diving (I never made it out to dive, unfortunately, but maybe I’ll end up in Sydney again and can go then). I still hadn’t bought a new snorkel, and didn’t even try going by the shop to get one since it was a holiday, so I was a little bit stuck with just my mask and fins, but it was still fun.

I saw lots of fun fish, including some that were tiny and brightly coloured. There were huge pointy urchins, skates in the sandy areas, and larger rockfish-type fish in the rockier/algae places (they put some concrete down there a while back to create reef habitat). I got super excited because I saw some floating critters that I’m pretty sure were cuttlefish, although when I compared Google images they might actually have been squid (I need to spend some time researching the differences). There were about seven of them all floating together and they were sort of blue-green-brown iridescent with big shiny eyes. It was kind of hard to keep track of them since I kept having to duck up every few minutes to get a breath of air, and they scooted away if I got too close, but they looked really wise from my perspective (maybe it was  the floating tentacles that sort of looked like a beard, haha). There were also cute crabs on the rocks that were entertaining to watch.

I went in the water at Coogee just before I left, to get a bit of the waves (although not getting bashed by the surf this time). I was stoked to get a nice view of a porcupinefish! It was just tooling along in the deeper surf, and was pretty big, like the size of a smallish watermelon. Super cute and spikey!

On the way back I bought some vanilla custard to put on my tiny Christmas pudding to celebrate New Year’s Day. It was super delicious!