Meet the site
Spot X is Byron Bay's least-visited notable dive site, a scatter of rocky pinnacles some 5 to 6 km north-east of Cape Byron that sees only a handful of trips a year, mostly through winter when a rare stretch of calm weather lines up with the local dive shops' interest in finding grey nurse sharks away from the crowds at Julian Rocks. Unlike Julian Rocks there is no permanent mooring here, so a visit depends on a skipper willing and able to relocate the pinnacles by GPS and echo sounder and drop a shot line directly onto the structure, which is one reason the site remains so lightly dived despite sitting only a short run from town. The topography is a series of rocky rises and ledges climbing from a sand bottom to around 15 m, generally comparable in scale to the deeper Julian Rocks sites but without any of the infrastructure — no mooring buoy, no regular boat traffic, and correspondingly none of the diver pressure that can make the sharks skittish elsewhere. In winter this translates into good numbers of grey nurse sharks holding station in the current along the ledges, joined by wobbegongs, large schooling kingfish and mixed reef fish, with the occasional bronze whaler seen further out over the sand. What keeps Spot X off the regular charter list is exposure: sitting well offshore with no shelter from swell in any direction, it demands a longer settled weather window than the operators need for Julian Rocks itself, and a booking here is realistically at the mercy of a rare calm patch rather than a set schedule. Divers should also be comfortable descending on a shot line with some current running and ascending independently under a surface marker buoy, since without a fixed mooring the boat cannot simply be relocated to wherever a group happens to surface. For experienced local divers chasing grey nurse sharks without the crowds of the more famous Tweed and Solitary Islands aggregation sites, Spot X is worth the wait for the right weather window, but it is not a site to book casually or expect to run on a set day.
What you might see
Grey nurse sharks (winter), wobbegongs, kingfish, large schooling reef fish, bull rays, occasional bronze whaler sharks
Location
A series of offshore rocky pinnacles roughly 5-6 km north-east of Cape Byron, an exposed, rarely dived site used mainly for winter grey nurse shark trips when conditions are unusually calm.
Before you make plans
Conditions, access and operator schedules can change. This is a location guide, not a dive plan. Ask a local operator about current conditions and suitability for your training and experience.
Sources & further reading
adreno.com.auRecord updated 26 Sept 2026. Source claims are being reviewed.