Quarantine Station Anchor

Meet the site

The Quarantine Station Anchor is a single large ship's anchor lying on the sand of Ticonderoga Bay off the Point Nepean Quarantine Station, listed by Scuba Doctor as a wreck dive in 10–12 m for Open Water divers at slack water. It is one of the many anchors lost or slipped by the immigrant ships that anchored off the station between the 1850s and the 1950s – the Quarantine Station Reef listing counts six more on the ridge 1.2 km to the west – and it has been catalogued as a site in its own right because it is isolated, easy to shot and large enough to fill a shallow dive.

The listing carries no description beyond position, depth and gear; the anchor is of the stocked Admiralty pattern typical of the sailing-ship era, several metres long, heavily concreted and grown with sponges, hydroids and ascidians, and it functions as a small artificial reef on an otherwise bare sand plain: leatherjackets, goatfish, wrasse and bullseyes gather on it, octopus and cuttlefish den beside it, and the surrounding sand holds stingrays, fiddler rays, spider crabs in season and the seahorses and pipefish of the Ticonderoga Bay sand. Bottles and other artefacts turn up in the sand around it as they do across the bay, and are protected.

It is a modest site, used by Portsea operators for Open Water training and navigation practice – the recommended reel and SMB are for exactly that, because a single object on flat sand is easy to lose in 5–10 m visibility – and by private boats wanting a sheltered, short, shallow dive close to Portsea. Combined with Artefacts Flood and Quarantine Station Reef it forms a trio of historic-seabed dives in the bay.

What you might see

Sponges, hydroids and ascidians on the anchor, leatherjackets, bluespotted goatfish, wrasse, bullseyes, octopus, giant cuttlefish, smooth stingray, southern fiddler ray, spider crabs (season), seahorses and pipefish

Location

A large historic anchor on the sand in Ticonderoga Bay offshore from the Quarantine Station, 574 m north-north-east of the Quarantine Station shore site and 1.3 km west of Portsea.