Category Archives: The Ocean

I love the ocean and when im not hacking away on the computer building stuff, I want to spend as much time as I can by the ocean. I like to spend time either swimming in the surf to do some body surfing, sitting by the beach and taking in the fresh air or go free diving to check out the underwater life. Whenever I get a chance to do any of those things and snap some pictures I will post them here. Also I might post some things such as equipment and gear that I buy to help me further enjoy the ocean activities … I will attempt to take pictures of as many beaches as I can firstly around Sydney then everywhere else !

Octopus Hide & Seek

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This morning after the usual rock pool swim I decided to go out into the open waters. The swell wasn’t to big, sun was shining and the ocean was nice and calm. Water wasn’t really to deep about 3 meters or so and I didn’t have a buddy or a buoy so I didn’t want to risk going to far in on my own.

Every morning I swim in the pools but I had never swam outside of the rock pool at all at shelly beach and was curious to see what was around. After diving down I saw a few small fish, lots of blue bottles (which thankfully didn’t sting me and lots of seaweed).

It was somewhat dull because it was still close to shore until on the way back I saw an octopus. It was pretty big and as I started to take my camera out to take a picture it must have seen me and scurried back under a tiny rock. I decided to wait for a while but still the octopus didn’t want to come out.

I swam away for a while to see if there where other interesting things to see and when I came back the octopus was out of its hiding place but poped straight back in as it saw me approach. Sucks … so all I managed to get was a picture of my friend the octopus hiding under the rock to scared to come out (I guess you can see one of its tentacles in the picture).

Next time what I might do is put the camera right outside its hiding spot and keep the film rolling so I can get a nice video of the beautiful creature (I guess kinda like how they managed to get a picture of the gigantic squid 100’s of meters below the ocean surface).

Rising Sun Over The Horizon…

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This is basically an extension of the post below. On todays swim I managed to get there before the sun rose and decided to keep my camera on so that I could capture the sun actually rising over the horizon.

I had left my camera on for about 30 mins before the memory was full but managed to catch the sun rise over the horizon in the last 6 minutes. I trimmed the rest of the video and have only left the best part for you to see. Added some nice relaxing music to the sunrise.

Hope you enjoy…

Sun Rise at Shelly Beach (Sydney Cronulla)

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I had a good deep sleep last night after finishing a days work on fixing up our mobile application for  BlipADeal. I finished about 11:30pm and went straight to bed allowing me to wake up at the planned 5:30 in the morning so I could head to the beach and catch the sunrise, something that I have been trying to do for a while but keep missing by about an hour 😛

Jumped into my car and drove to shelly beach, road was pretty empty this early in the morning so it was a nice quick drive. Since its a Saturday morning people are probably still hung over from Friday night drinks after work 😛 I got to the car park expecting to easily find parking but was surprised that there was only one left. I guess people are also here to enjoy the beautiful morning 🙂

When I got to the esplande (the name of the walk way right by the beach) it was full of people taking pictures.  I always keep my water proof camera in my bag incase there are some great shots to take underwater so I pulled it out and began snapping some pictures and taking a few videos of the beautiful sunrise.

Sunrise @ Shelly Beach Sydney AustraliaThe sky was pretty cloudy but you could see that it was slowly blowing away and soon would be clear skys. The sun was sitting just below the clouds and it created a beautiful horizon where the top was filled with clouds and the bottom with the blue sea with the sun right in the middle (almost like the light at the end of the tunnel 🙂 ) Took some shots of the beautiful scenery for everyone to enjoy.

It was very peaceful with very light breeze on the shore, however the oceans had really high swell and as a result surfers, body boarders where all out taking advantage of the ocean and the great morning. After my swim I dried of and put my running shoes on and ran up and down the esplande for about 40 mins. Now back at home finishing of this blog post and ready to crank open the editor and begin hacking away 😛

Shore on the sunrise

Free Diving Clovelly – (Sydney Australia)…

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Over the last couple of weeks I have been wanting to go to Clovelly to explore the underwater marine life. Clovelly is a great place to dive because its safe but still fun to explore. There are life guards present and the beach is actually enclosed like a massive swimming pool meaning that its not out in the open ocean. For obvious reasons this is a much safer environment.

The great thing about Clovelly is that even though its enclosed there is still very significant depths in different areas of the beach so that it is still fun to free dive and still a challenge. There is some decent marine life including the famous bluey groper and its deep enough so that you can practice various free diving techniques to improve your diving for when you go to deeper and more open waters.

One of the major disadvantages with clovelly is if there has been rain any of the previous days you can forget about visibility. You will get about 2 feet visibility and that is it. As a result this makes anything other then swimming laps unacceptable. However, today was a great day and the visibility was pretty good, not the best but still acceptable.

In the video I posted above, I was able to get clips of the famous big blue gropers, some other colourful fish (which I don’t know the names of yet) and even a wandering scuba diver roaming around by him/her self (ran out of air before I could approach and say “hi !” 🙁 ). The clip was taken without fins and no camera pole so its pretty jerky and can really be improved in future videos. Hopefully when I get around to buying/making my own camera pole and getting some decent fins, I can improve the quality of the videos.

Anyway, video posted above, hope you enjoy it ! I had a great time making it 🙂

Below are the directions from the main city of sydney to clovelly beach:

sydney-to-gordons-bay

The Water, Beach & Ocean

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(Note music starts after 10 seconds)

One of the advantages of living in Australia’s east coast is the fact there is beautiful beaches very close by. If you love being in the ocean as much as I do its very hard to imagine living anywhere else where this kind of access to the beautiful clean beaches is not readily available.

I have lived and worked in asia in the past and also really love the atmosphere there but for very different reasons so sometimes im torn between deciding to one day move overseas and live in asia (Indonesia specifically) or to continue living here in Australia.

I run my own technology business and work varying different hours. Sometimes its a normal 8 hour day and other times when the pressure is on to finish something we want to deliver it may be a straight 14hr marathon. It’s not as bad currently as much of the core development we needed to do has been completed however there are still the one off days when its required.

Regardless of the situation though, prior to any work I usually wake up in the morning at about 6:30 and pick up Damir (who is my swimming buddy) and drive to Cronulla where we head towards   shelly beach. Shelly beach is a nice beautiful little beach which has an ocean pool (where the pool is filled with ocean water) nice little sandy beach and really beautiful rocks to sit down and collect your thoughts or prepare for the day ahead. We usually spend about 1-2 hours at the beach swimming (about 1.6kms), spend some time with stretches, breathing exercises and then taking out the bags and gloves for some cardio workouts. It’s a great start to the day and the water, the beach and the ocean with all the ocean spray and the fresh air is something hard to imagine doing without once you are used to the feeling.

Picturing a morning where I can not do this is difficult as it has become so routine. Anyway it doesn’t matter,  things are going great so I am just enjoying what I currently have 🙂 When and if things change in the future, so be it …