Byron Bay is situated in New South Wales, Australia. It is famous for its laid-back hippie culture and you will see an endless amount of surfers, backpackers and ancient VW vans. Most accommodation here is low-budget and there are some reasonable prices campsites at great locations near the beach. You will find that getting here is absolutely no problem and you won’t get bored because you can shop, eat & drink and party here for ages. There are lots of little offices offering various types of water sports and there are a couple of dive schools.

Julian Rocks

Scuba diving is popular here because of a marine reserve called Julian Rocks, which lies just of the coast from Byron Bay. It takes only about 20 minutes by boat to get there. Julian Rocks is well-known for its diversity of marine life and its enormous schools of fish.

Grey nurse sharks

Also it is one of the few places in the world where you can still find the endangered grey nurse shark (the one with the ferocious looking teeth). It is said that they are to become extinct soon, because of the fact that the sharks that are left are almost all family, sharing very similar genes. Inbreeding will only weaken this already fragile species even further. Unfortunately, we did not see any grey nurse sharks, but they have been spotted on the same day that we were there (as nearly every day), so your chances to see one are fairly large.

Diving conditions

The waters here are usually 20-21 degrees Celsius, but you can feel clearly that there are warm currents, which make a difference of a couple of degrees. The visibility was only about 5-6 metres, but that can change with the seasons.

Byron Bay Dive Centre

We choose to dive with Byron Bay Dive Centre. They have very friendly and well-educated dive leaders and a nice shop. They do very good dive briefings as well and have state of the art dive gear. To get to the dive sites you are transported the short hop to the beach in a very old Toyota Landcruiser, with the rubber dive boats (tenders) on a trailer behind. The boats are relatively small but comfortable enough, since you’ll reach the destination within about 20 minutes.

Julian Rocks dive sites

The first dive site was called Nursery-Needles, with a depth of nearly 15 metres. Here you can find many large schools of smaller fish, as well as loggerhead turtles, green turtles, puffers, porcupines, Moorish idols, brown triggerfish, bull rays, blue spotted stingrays and wobbegong sharks.

The next dive site was Hugo’s Trench, also with a depth of around 15 metres. At this site you can spot a lot of bull rays in various sizes, green turtles, spotted eagle rays, lionfish, white-eyed moray eels, porcupines and wobbegong sharks. We also encountered many large schools of fish and a kingfish feeding frenzy here. Byron Bay definitely is an very exiting place to dive.