Pelican Point, Flinders

Reef Dive | Boat access

Depth: 3 m (9.84 ft) to 25 m (82 ft)

Level: Advanced Open Water and beyond.

Pelican Point lies on the southern coast of the Mornington Peninsula, between Bushrangers Bay to the west and Simmons Bay to the east, towards Cape Schanck from Flinders. The Arch dive site lies to the east.

Heading west from Flinders towards Cape Schanck you pass some spectacular and rugged scenery with towering basalt cliffs, blowholes and coastal stacks. Be sure to give West Head and Bismark Reef a wide berth, as swell builds up over these shallow reefs on even the calmest days. Passing The Blowhole and majestic Lady Face Point, Pelican Point comes into view.

If you position the boat on the western side of Pelican Point in the lee of the bommie, you'll find you're perched over a wall that drops from three metres to 16 metres. Follow the wall to a series of huge overhangs, caverns and swim throughs. You can find Sea Sweep, Southern Blue Devil, Port Jackson Shark, plus the usual Leatherjackets, Wrasse, Snook and Silver Trumpeter. Invertebrate life is dense in the many undercut ledges and overhangs. Chasms and gutters are everywhere.

You can also explore the eastern corner of Pelican Point, adjacent to the channel which cuts throught the network of bommies on the western side. Here you'll find Sea Sweep, Southern Blue Devil, and Bulleyes as you explore ledges festooned with rich sponge life and delicate gorgonian fans.

A gutter framed by vertical walls plunges from 4 metres to 16 metres, the opposite edges of basalt bommies topped with a dense kelp forest. Hidden by kelp, a deep cleft in the wall reveals a small patch of Southern Jewel anemones growing a brilliant pink in the strong sunlight. The surrounding walls are richly covered with gorgonian fans of every colour — pink, yellow, vivid orange, pale orange and crimson decorate evry square metre in a blaze of colour — no doubt they are dependent on the rich currents which flow through the gutter for their planktonic diet.

Dull by comparison, but more impressive for its twisted, tree-like form, a Dusky Sea fern, a type of hydroid colony, continues to feed, its polyps expanded to the gentle flow. The gutter eventually narrows, leading you through the bommie to the western side where the seafloor deepens into a sharp crevasse, the home of a thriving community of Leatherjackets and Bluethroat Wrasse.

Here you can rest for a moment, reclining on the floor of the chasm watching schools of Pike and Sea Sweep wheel overhead whilst you are studied by curious Magpie Perch and Senator Wrasse. Here on the chasm walls, you can find Verco's Nudibrachs, amongst yellow zoanthid anemones and occasional purple bryozoans and fragile solitary hydroids.

You can drift back to the boat, eased along by the weak current that flows around the bommie between tide changes, followed up by the anchor line by the resident escort of Sea Sweep, their steely sides glistening in the strong sunlight.

Location: Flinders, Victoria 3929
MELWAY Ref: Page 258 D12

Entry/Exit: Access is by boat from the Flinders Boat Ramp in Western Port. Best to keep the dive boat live rather than anchor, and drop divers in the lee on the western side of the bommie.

Ideal Conditions: If the swell is anything greater than 1 metre you should be looking for a deeper dive site offshore. For this dive site you need absolutely perfect conditions with no wind, no waves and no swell. The sites face south, so any wind needs to be light offshore northerlies. See WillyWeather (Simmons Bay) as a guide for the tide times and the height of the tide.

Acknowledgement: We'd like to thank Alan Wiggs whose article "One Perfect Day" in "Sportdiving Magazine" provided most the information you see above. See One Perfect Day by Alan Wiggs

Back Beach Warning: Always keep an eye on sea conditions throughout any dive on the Back Beaches of the Mornington Peninsula. Please read the warnings on the web page diving-the-back-beaches before diving or snorkelling this site.

Boon Wurrung / Bunurong country

Traditional Owners — This dive site is in the traditional Country of the Boon Wurrung / Bunurong people of the Kulin Nation. This truly ancient Country includes parts of Port Phillip, from the Werribee River in the north-west, down to Wilson's Promontory in the south-east, including the Mornington Peninsula, French Island and Phillip Island, plus Western Port. We wish to acknowledge the Boon Wurrung as Traditional Owners. We pay respect to their Ancestors and their Elders, past, present and emerging. We acknowledge Bunjil the Creator Spirit of this beautiful land, who travels as an eagle, and Waarn, who protects the waterways and travels as a crow, and thank them for continuing to watch over this Country today and beyond.

 

Pelican Point, Flinders Location Map

Latitude: 38° 29.934′ S   (38.498902° S / 38° 29′ 56.05″ S)
Longitude: 144° 55.379′ E   (144.922975° E / 144° 55′ 22.71″ E)
Datum: WGS84 | Google Map
Added: 2022-04-05 01:52:11 GMT, Last updated: 2022-04-05 10:03:01 GMT
Source: Google Earth
Nearest Neighbour: The Arch, Flinders, 1,341 m, bearing 85°, E
Flinders, Mornington Peninsula.
Depth: 3 to 25 m.

DISCLAIMER: No claim is made by The Scuba Doctor as to the accuracy of the dive site coordinates listed here. Should anyone decide to use these GPS marks to locate and dive on a site, they do so entirely at their own risk. Always verify against other sources.

The marks come from numerous sources including commercial operators, independent dive clubs, reference works, and active divers. Some are known to be accurate, while others may not be. Some GPS marks may even have come from maps using the AGD66 datum, and thus may need be converted to the WGS84 datum. To distinguish between the possible accuracy of the dive site marks, we've tried to give each mark a source of GPS, Google Earth, or unknown.