Over the years I have made dozens of dive trips to Byron Bay, seeing wonderful marine life and many thousands of wobbegongs. My first trip was in 1984 and my lasting memory of that holiday was an encounter with a monster wobby.
Our dive guide, Pete Murphy, gave us all an enjoyable tour around Cod Hole at Julian Rocks. Towards the end of the dive we came upon a huge spotted wobbegong, easily 3m long and with a head a metre wide. This was the biggest wobbegong I had ever seen.
While we stayed back, Pete decided to pat the wobby, his hand slowly reaching out towards the shark’s side. SNAP! In a split second the wobby had turned its head and snapped at Pete, its long sharp teeth barely millimetres in front of his mask. Pete jumped back and had turned white. My view of the event was spectacular. The wobby was only warning Pete to back off, as it could have easily engulfed his head and upper torso in that huge mouth!
Another memorable wobby encounter at Byron Bay occurred in 1986, when a mate Tony Little was attacked by a 30cm long baby ornate wobbegong while diving The Nursery at Julian Rocks. Tony was trying to take a close-up of the tiny shark with his Nikonos camera with extension tubes. As he placed the wire framer in front of its head the wobby suddenly bit down on it and started to shake it violently. The wobby then darted into a crevasse. When Tony showed me his wire framer we could see small dents in it from the powerful jaw of the little shark.
Three species of wobbegong are common at Byron Bay dive sites, the large banded wobbegong and spotted wobbegong, which grow to 3m, and the smaller ornate wobbegong, which only reach 1m in length. These sharks are seen in large numbers at Byron Bay throughout the year and can be observed lazin
g
on the bottom, lazing in caves, lazing in crevasses, lazing on each other and
occasionally swimming slowly around looking for a new spot to lazy on. They
spend most of their time lazing around because they are ambush predators,
waiting for prey to swim close enough to be grabbed, and there is always plenty
of fish for them to feed on at Byron Bay.Over the winter months pregnant wobbies are commonly seen, with huge bulging stomachs. In 1991 I observed a pregnant female that was rubbing her side and stomach along the sandy bottom. For several minutes the shark would scrap one side and then the other along the course sand. I was hoping to witness the rare birth of a baby wobby, however after a few minutes she settled on the bottom. She may have been suffering labour pains or from a very itchy side.
On a recent trip to Byron Bay in May this year the wobbegong numbers were phenomenal. We had brilliant conditions, 25m visibility, 21C water temperature, light winds and calm seas for diving around Julian Rocks with Sundive.
On our first dive at The Nursery we jumped in to find the bottom literally carpeted with wobbies. In our fifty minute dive we must have seen two hundred spotted, banded and ornate wobbegongs. Usually you see quite a lot of wobbegongs at this site, but the numbers were just ridiculous. The sharks ranged in size from 30cm to 250cm, including quite a few pregnant females. You had to be careful where you placed your hands and fins as you were likely to land on a wobby. Of course there were many other wonderful animals to see around Julian Rocks, including kingfish, lionfish, blue gropers, turtles, black cod, estuary gropers, sweetlips, crayfish and tropical fish, but the number of wobbegongs was simply astonishi
ng.We enjoyed three great dives around Julian Rocks and with such good conditions decided to finish the weekend off with a dive on the Tassie II, a shipwreck off Byron’s main beach. It has been twenty years since the last time I dived this wreck, which was a 40m long single screw cargo ship that sunk in 1944 while on a voyage to Papua New Guinea. The wreck lies in only 5m to 7m of water, but attracts quite an abundance of marine life, including turtles, stingrays, schools of silver batfish, yellowtail, bullseyes and of course wobbegongs.
After spending forty minutes swimming around the hull we had seen too many wobbegongs to count. In some of the ledges a dozen wobbies were tightly packed together. The wobbies on the wreck have a yellow tinge to their skin, possibly because they absorb the iron from the rusting ship.