I left to Auckland this morning and I’m now staying at Base Backpackers. I will leave tomorrow afternoon to Sydney. As this is a small world, when I was walking around Queen street I was recognized by Catherine, who I met during my stay in Noumea, New Caledonia, in may 2002 ! Funny that ! She’s been in New Zealand for several months and is heading to Hawaii in about 2 weeks.
All the experienced divers were to jump into Deep Six from Paihia Dive, a fast rubber boat that can reach 30kt while all others divers were on the big slow boat. We made it to the Rainbow Warrior in about 1h despite a topside visibility that was as much as the underwater one: about 15m at most due to a very thick myst.
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I left Whangarei and I have been driving to Paihia about 100km north. I will be diving the Rainbow Warrior tomorrow with Paihia Dive and will probably go back to Whangarei in the late afternoon. As you can guess it from a previous article, the Rainbow Warrior is rated in the flyers as one of the top 10 wreck dives in the world.
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Poor Knights diving again. After the photographic disaster of yesterday, that was mandatory. I buddied up with Richard equipped with a dry-suit. And we did our own thing. We are both lazy divers and like to inspect every square centimeter of rock, so that was perfect. Sea conditions were pretty flat, visibility around 20m, 16C and like yesterday, full of salps.
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I have been diving the Poor Knights islands with Dive Tutukaka. To be very original, I will mention what is said in just about every flyer of any company offering diving in those islands: “The Poor Knights are one of the top ten dive locations in the world.” (Jacques-Yves Cousteau). This is very difficult to rate such things as you see different things at different places but New Zealand and Australia like very much to say that any place they have is among the top 10 of something (which leads probably to a top 1000 at the end).
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