Diving Naval Waters

Does anyone know the regulations regarding diving naval waters, in particular, the 9 wrecks around Swan Island Port Phillip Bay. Is it possible to get permission easily or is it a bureaucratic nightmare and not worth the effort, given the depth (or lack of it) on these wrecks?

Yeah, that's a 'secret' SAAS training base, and they really get nervous about boats, and especially divers close to the island. Having said that we have been able to get permission to conduct canoe activities, but only near the golf course.

Alan

Just a quick clarification re "Naval Waters" around Swan Island in Port Phillip Bay. The larger area marked as "Naval Waters" on the chart is not completely a "no-go" area - it just means that area is under Navy control. The super sensitive absolutely "no-go" area is a lot smaller area mostly only a few hundred meters from shore and marked on the northern and eastern sides by a string of piles with yellow top marks and some nasty signs. Unfortunately I think this area includes the stranded J3(?) Sub.

Although I sailed past the area less than a week ago I can't quite recall the exact alignment of the northern "no-go" boundary but presumably it runs across to Point Norgate to protect the Dock infrastructure at the base. Not sure of the whereabouts of the 9 wrecks Peter 6956 mentions, but one Historic Wreck showing on my AUS153 chart at roughly 38 14.2'S 144 41.3'E might just fall outside the northern boundary.

You'll need to get a better definition of the locations of the perilous yellow posts to know where you stand re access to this and other wrecks. As Alan says it is a top level facility ( the "spooks" acquired a section of the Navy area post 911 ) and you risk jail time for any incursion.

I found the following link on google that speculates on what may or may not go on there, but it doesn't give precise boundaries:-
Secretive Swan Island Training Area

cheers,
packo

Is there a way to embed a picture into a post?

On my GPS plot I can see the marks you are talking about Packo.

According to the info I have the following would be inside the line;

Countess of Houptown
SF hersey
J3
Will O the Whisp
Mystery
Childers

Medea, Mountain maid and Ivy Floren appear outside the line

and Isa (the one you gave position on according to my info) may be outside depending if I use scubadoctor mark (inside), or where I think it is according to my chart mark (outside).

And on that note, give the chart shows a historical wreck at about 180m NE of the SD mark, it suggests that the one Lloyd has been given is on a AUS66 Datum and not WGS84, hence the need to specify datum setting of your GPS at time of marking, a point that some seem to not understand or bother with I think.

If you do a reply, not a quick reply, the options to add images, maps etc are there in the full post editor.

Yep I had found that but it doesn't let you embed into the post, only via a link and as the pic is off some software off my PC there is no link

Hi Peter,

You are right, the forum only allows you to link to an image on some third party server so when you use the "img" tag it can appear to be embedded within the post. The funny thing is that when you do that, on the first opening of your "post+pic", the "pic" gets added to the cache of the dive-oz server.

On subsequent reads of your post, the image comes straight from the dive-oz server cache and there seems to be no further involvement of the 3rd party hosting site. (unless the dive-oz cache gets trashed). Just like the cache on your own browser, this speeds up the whole process and saves on external data costs.

Webby can probably give us good reasons why direct upload of an image into the dive-oz equipment is either not possible or not desirable.

A catch in this is that it seems when the forum code checks whether an image referenced by the "img" tag is in its cache or not, it seems to check only the image pathname (and not the creation time-stamp.) So if you update the image on the third party server, but don't change its name or pathname, the forum will continue to serve up the old image. I have been caught a few times on this.

There are plenty of free image/photo hosting websites around, but more recently some of these have clamped down on (charge $ for) allowing direct links to the stored images from 3rd party websites such as forums. Other posters might have some recommendations on which sites are best to use.

cheers,
packo

Postimg is a free image hosting site and it seems to work well.

I just use Flikr and copy the BBcode, then paste it here...