Olympic Wall

Meet the site

Olympic Wall is a small, shallow wall on the Queenscliff side of the inner Heads, south of Shortland Bluff and between the Lonsdale Bight sponge reefs and the deep walls of Spectacular Reef. The Scuba Doctor listing gives a depth range of 12–18 m, an Open Water rating and the standard 'dive only on SWF, SWE' slack-water restriction, but carries no descriptive text; what follows is drawn from the depth, the position and the neighbouring sites.

At 12–18 m this is one of the few genuine walls at the Heads that an Open Water diver can do in full. The reef top at 12 m is the same broken limestone and sponge garden that characterises the Lonsdale Bight, and the drop – short, perhaps 4–6 m – has the undercuts and encrusting life of the bigger walls in miniature: zoanthids, sponges, ascidians, with blue devils, leatherjackets, magpie perch and crayfish in the ledges. Knawesome Bommie, a 12–40 m pinnacle, lies 570 m to the north-east, and the 40 m walls of Spec Reef are a few hundred metres south.

It is slack-water only, like everything in this stretch of the bay, but the depth makes it a forgiving site with a full 40-minute dive possible on a long slack, and no shipping-channel complications on the reef itself. It is not on the regular charter list and is dived by club and private boats, which makes it a quiet alternative on a day when the popular wall sections are busy. Data confidence is moderate: the site is documented only as a listing, and the description of its features is inferred.

What you might see

Southern blue devil, southern rock lobster, magpie perch, leatherjackets, old wife, sponges, zoanthids, ascidians, nudibranchs

Location

Small wall inside the bay south-east of Queenscliff, about 1.6 km south of Shortland Bluff and 570 m south-west of Knawesome Bommie.