June & July 2023 – Jetty Dive Debrief
Welcome to the June & July 2023 Jetty Dive Debrief! This is our newest addition to the blog – the “debrief”. Here we are going to let you know how the water has been, what the season showed us, any interesting or noteworthy details, and what we’ve achieved as a shop!
Updates
June marks the start of our Whale Watching season, and with school holidays we were so busy with our Whale Watching trips, which was amazing! If you joined us for a trip in this time thank you for supporting us! I hope you had a great time 😊.
Towards the end of July we launched our new booking system! Goodbye are the days of our clunky online booking portal, and welcome to a faster, smoother, much more attractive booking system allowing you to join us! You can find these bookings on any page of our website, and I can even link it to you here! Magic ✨
And because of that I have been so busy here trying to get everything organized! From transitioning to an entirely new booking system, moving our forward bookings, and am now in the process of sorting our waivers out better so that it’s easier for our customers. I get a kick out of figuring out this sort of technical stuff so it’s been fun but exhausting. I’ll be excited to get it all finished and get back to my ‘normal’ job – and keep improving our online store.
I combined the June & July debrief’s mainly because I didn’t have time to do it early July with our booking system changover and the opening of Whale Swimming bookings, but we weren’t running as many dives throughout July so there would be less to report on! That being said, this report might be a little bit more condensed than they used to be as I’m fitting in two months worth into one post.
Seasonal Marine Life Activity:
Lets get into some more notable of the sightings across the June and July period…
On the 4th of June we saw a clown trigger fish on our dive, which is not the most common fish around! Take a look at the picture Lindsay captured on our dive report page, here. In other not-common fish, there was a few Semicircle Angelfish crusing around on the 8th of July and the 16th.
There were plenty of octopus hanging around for the whole month of June! See here on the 4th of June, 10th, 16th, 17th, 19th, five on the 25th, one on the 16th of July, and the 30th.
On the 9th of June we had some nice big numbers of Grey Nurse Sharks, with about 30 being sighted across the dives. There was about 20 at Manta Arch on the 11th, about 40 on the 16th and the 18th, about 30 on the 17th, 20-30 on the 24th, 30+ on the 25th of June, 20+ on the 6th of July, 10+ on the 8th July, 10-15 on the 9th,
There were also numbers of cuttlefish throughout the month. We spotted two on the 9th, one on the 11th and 17th, three on the 25th, one on the 8th of July,
There were some QLD Groper a few times throughout the month, too, and these are not super commmon! We saw one on the 11th who hung around until the 12th, the 22nd , the 8th of July.
Plus! The Whales! We had so many amazing Whale Watching trips throughout June and July, with some awesome experiences with Whales breaching for our boat!
Certifications
PADI Open Water Divers
Congratulations to our newly certified PADI Open Water Divers:
Amy, Benjamin H, Ben M, Darcy Jack, Jennifer, Jonathon, Katy, Micheal, and Riley. Plus our new Junior Open Water Divers: Alex, and Iki!
– Good work, divers!
PADI Advanced Open Water Divers
Congratulations to our newly certified PADI Advanced Open Water Divers:
Isaac and Sally – Congratulations!
Congratulations to our newest Enriched Air Nitrox Divers, Charlotte, Joshua, Kevin, Sally and Summa!
Conditions
Visibility
For June, visibility was quite good, sticking around the 10m-15m mark for most of the month. This was similar with the days we got out in July! Take a look at our graph below for a more detailed and visual look at the visibility
Temperature
The temperature is still trending downwards in June and July, check out our charting of the temperatures below. Please note that I have added the “16°” plot point to this chart where it previously has not been, so if comparing to previous months it will look different.
Sustainability and the environment
This section we are dedicating to showing what steps we are taking to reduce our environmental impact. It might include incentives we have implemented or tried through the month, or programs we have participated in. We intend to expand upon our conservation efforts page with everything we have implemented in store – as we are doing much more than this page shows!
During a dive on the last weekend of july, our Divemasters removed 2x ropes from illegal cray traps from the water. We were unable to remove the traps as they were too large for us to lift without equipment, but we damaged the mesh that the trap was created from, so hopefully no marine life will get stuck in the trap.
With changing to a new, more updated booking system, we have been graced with some waste-saving alternatives. The app for the booking system is super intuitive and easy to use, and allows us to have a digital manifest, eliminating the need for any paper for these. We were still using a paper manifest for our Whale Watching trips because of the high numbers of customers, but we no longer need to do that now!
We also now have Reef-Friendly sunscreen available for purchase in store! You can find them on our online store here: Sunscreen. The brand Little Urchin is an Australian company, they named their products as Sea Urchins have a protective mechanism that acts like a barrier to the sun!
Photo of the Month
Want to be featured in our photo of the month? Send your submissions through to [email protected], with “Photo of the Month Submission” as your subject and I’ll pick the best one for our debrief and email newsletter.
The Month Ahead!
Whale Swimming!!
Throughout August and September we are running our awesome Whale Swimming experiences! You can book in now, here! Don’t miss out!
We are of course still running our Whale Watching trips up until October, and you can book those here.
Our dives are still running, and we have the lovely Grey Nurse Sharks hanging around in big numbers throughout winter.
Newsletter
We have a monthly newsletter with updates similar to this blog post. Some of our favorite customer pictures, new product releases or favorite products. If you want to hear from us (we wont spam you, I promise!) sign up here, and click “Newsletter”.
If you have anything you would like to hear about in this debrief, or in our newsletter, or even any suggestions for another name for this debrief, please contact us and let us know!
Thanks for reading the June & July 2023 Jetty Dive Debrief! We appreciate you 🙂
About the Author
Tara is Jetty Dive’s Office Manager and IT Lady, Social Media Queen, Crazy-Fish-Lady, and as she likes to say – “Self-Appointed CEO”. You’ll find her sitting at her desk surrounded in pink, but happiest either on or under the water.
