Last Friday was memorable.
I went through a normal Friday school day (Maths, sport, careers ed) up until lunch. After lunch I went snorkelling as part of my outdoor education elective. Sadly when we got to the beach the wind picked up and the clouds covered the sun. So basically, it got kind of cold. With all my gear on I walked down to the water’s edge and felt the water, by golly it was cold! With no sun to heat the water up, my time in the water was quite unenjoyable. The low levels of sunlight, the weak current and the dozen pairs of legs kicking around made for murky waters. It was quite uneventful except for the small wobbegong I spotted and Bailey scratching his hands on a crayfish. I was pretty pumped to try my luck at catching some that afternoon with Lochie after Bailey was talking up the size of the crayfish he got his hands on.
My day dreams of catching huge crayfish persisted through the next half hour which consisted of meeting Lochie at school, riding together to the Ambulance centre next to the school (Lochie’s mum works there), getting changed into our wetsuits and zipping down to the beach. After locking up our bikes and agreeing to take our dive bags in the water with us so we could store any caught crayfish inside. My dive bag is a fluorescent yellow bag with a large opening which is held shut by a spring.
The clouds had moved on since school ended and the wind slowed down to just a few knots. Without further ado we dived in and swam to our diving area as fast as we could. Even with our wetsuits on it was a bit chilly. But after I got my blood pumping I was feeling much warmer and eager to locate some crays. After a while we spotted a deep ledge with several huge crays hiding inside. When I resurfaced the sand I had stirred up took ages to settle. I knew that there was going to be a long wait between dives because of the murkiness.
After spending a half hour of fruitless attempts at snaring a cray, Lochie stayed under water for a long time and tried to pull something from under the ledge. He backed out with empty hands and started swimming back up. As he was resurfacing he “flipped the bird” at the ledge and tried to mouth something to me with a big grin on his face. He held his hands about 40cm apart and I knew he had his hands on a ripper! We stood on a shallow part of the rock and he said that the crayfish was so big he couldn’t get his hand around the top of its shell! After hearing this news I dived straight down to the ledge and spotted a crayfish. It wasn’t the monster Lochie grabbed but it would have to do. I stuck the metal pole of my cray snare behind the crayfish and pushed on the back of the pole to widen the loop at the end. I slowly put it around the crayfish’s tail and let go of the pole which snapped the loop around the end of the crayfish’s tail. I barely had time to reach for the crayfish before it slammed it’s muscular tail and flicked out of the loop. I tried to swear but bubbles just came out and made it more urgent for me to reach the surface. I checked my watch as I reached the surface and it was time to head back in. With a wave of my middle finger to the ledge I started swimming in with Lochie trailing behind. We arrived back at the beach and we were kind of disappointed by the lack of crayfish in our hands. We rode home up the hill with our gear and that ended our Friday afternoon. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped but on the bright side, at least I looped my first crayfish!