Scuba Diving the Poor Knights 

Scuba Diving the Poor Knights

Over Christmas my wife and I were in New Zealand visiting my family and we decided to take a trip up to the Poor Knight Island in Northland to do some scuba diving.

We dived with Dive Tutukaka who were a very professional outfit with big comfortable boats and efficient and helpful divemasters. Our divemaster was an English lad spending a year in New Zealand diving while his wife worked as a doctor in a local hospital. All right for some!

New Zealand has had a terrible summer and the water temperature was a toasty 15 degrees. Normally it should have been 20 at this point in summer which would have made things a little nicer.

The briefings were very thorough and it was very easy to visualise the bottom topography. Jane and I dived in a two piece 7mm which was barely enough but it was extremely beautiful underwater. There were kelp forests all over the place and schooling fish in abundance. The only way to see things properly was to get right down in the kelp and push your way through... Before anybody springs up to criticise you should know that these kelp holdalls are far far stronger than we are so we don't damage them in any way.

We had been told to expect stingrays and carpet sharks but they certainly weren't on display. We were a bit disappointed but the dive on the whole was going pretty well. Our time was almost up so we started to move a bit shallower ready for our safety stops. I had my head deep in the kelp when suddenly I noticed a small carpet shark. Having never seen one before I was quite pleased and pointed it out to my wife who nonchalently pointed out the other on a couple of metres beyond. Then of course we noticed the longtailed stingray. Not a bad dive at all!!!