azzurro
Snorkelling Brighton Beach
When I enter the water at the sparkling shallows of Brighton Beach, my very first encounter is the swarm of hundreds of glittering, silver school fish that at first, appear to be all the same. But as I swim closer to the Jetty, my eyes adjust to see they swim in slightly different schools.
Sand Whiting pool in perfect circles on the seabed, nibbling at whatever they can find in the sand. From afar they look like underwater puddles. Sometimes when they let me get up close, I notice that I can stir up the water and they flock to my hands looking for tasty buried snacks that become dislodged in the sand cloud. The school gets so big that I sometimes find myself surrounded in a fish tunnel with no beginning or end. A parade of eyeballs, each looking directly back at me.
Under the jetty
Under the Jetty, where the light shifts from bright sunshine to cold, stone-like shadow, Tommy Ruff swim loops entwined with schools of tiny Woods Siphonfish. The ‘tommies’ are spattered with twisted stripes on their backs, swim by the hundreds and have a slightly goofy smile in their mouth.
Sometimes I feel as though I can see faint flickers of iridescent pink or green if I look a little harder at their shiny scales. It’s not the kind of colour you could ever photograph. If the Woods Siphonfish pause for just a fleeting moment, they reveal their transparent bodies, with tiny pumping hearts and blue organs clinging to a blood red thread of innards. Their eyes are rounder and cuter than those of the Tommies’. It’s hard to get a proper look before the school flutters away and turns back into a silver blur of neon red stripes.
I paddle a little further out
I paddle just a little further out, under the part of the Jetty with shade sails. Here’s where I find a harem of Ornate Cowfish, floating lanterns chugging through the water covered in mind-bending patterns that look like they were painted on by hand. The females have a dark tan colour with zinging white spots outlined in a contrasting black that pops right into your eyes. The males are a magnificent orange and blue- tones that are hard to believe can exist in nature. The older ones appear to have taken some hits over their time and have shredded fins or even pests stuck to their faces- tiny, lice-like pink critters near their mouths.
Every time I dive here, I find the same Cowfish with only one fin. Today she’s picking at the upturned body of a crab, carefully spinning in wide berths to take whatever munches she could manage to get. Deeper out I find two younger male Cowfish ganging up on a live Surf Crab and picking its legs off sequentially. Despite being slow and pretty- they’re still a part of the game of life that requires them to feed or be fed on.
Every now and then as I glide close to the sand, a crab will suddenly shoot out of the sand and reveal itself dramatically with its claws raised. Sometimes it jump scares me but usually it’s just funny- I wonder if they do it behind my back when I’m not paying attention.
Among the cheeky leatherjackets
On the pylons of the Jetty exists an entire ecosystem in and of itself. Tiny spiked leatherjackets hug close to the concrete- particularly scared of me. They barely ever let me get a look, at first I
thought I was just seeing pieces of coral or debris flinging around. As I revolve around the pylon, they too move on its other side in a game of cat and mouse. If I try to trick them by quickly meeting them on the side that they’re swimming to, they see it coming and trick me back. Whoever says fish have no personality has clearly only ever seen them on a plate.
Among the cheeky leatherjackets are glassy skeleton shrimps, fussing with their petite claws over the colourful muck amassing on their vertical reef garden. Fat purple-red Rock Crabs hide up high amid leafy chunks of coral, much craftier spots than their Surf Crab cousins in the sand below. Sometimes I find the same little flathead here in his favourite spot in the dish forming at the pylon’s base. He tenses whenever I look at him, and relaxes whenever I look away.
A puffer catches my eye
A puffer catches my eye, and suddenly I notice they’ve been everywhere around me this whole time. Timid, jet boosted nuggets that move a hell of a lot quicker than the Ornate Cowfish despite having the same awkward shape.
I glide out of the Jetty’s shadow back into the warm sun of the shallows, and follow the shore. As I go, baby puffs see me coming and get behind single pieces of seaweed, or tuck down into the corrugated sand bed, hiding hopelessly behind little dunes. When I pass directly over them, they crouch into the ground and brace for impact, wagging their tails in submission like puppy dogs knowing they’re about to be picked up and cuddled. They’re a lot more ‘pygmy’ than the puffs I see at Port Noarlunga’s Jetty, but have the same patterning and stoned red eyes.
I start to count my strokes and breathe deeply, getting into a groove of swimming against the current. While I’m focused on the pieces of seaweed fluttering beneath me, I notice one is moving in a funny way. It’s a sea spider, unfurling its many arms in all directions, clawing through the tide in a creeping motion. It looks like a single spore of yellow-and-blue-striped christmas tinsel.
It’s so tiny it’s almost microscopic, but I can see that it’s making its way towards me. I never would have seen the sea spider if a baby puff hadn’t drawn my attention to the mess of plant life scattered like abandoned lego pieces on the sand. In all the days I’ve spent staring at this sand I’ve never noticed one before. I wonder if that’s why I haven’t found a pipefish yet almost impossible to distinguish from seaweed unless you are really, really looking. The spider almost reaches my goggles, I shudder and paddle away, preferring not to think about it too much more.
Without warning
BAM! Suddenly and without any warning a Blue Swimmer Crab explodes out of the sand and I am locked in a one-on-one Mexican standoff. He’s a lot bigger than the Surf and Rock crabs, with his impressive purple and white claws high above his electric blue carapace as if to say ‘you shall not pass’. I like to think it’s not intimidating me, but I’ve paused mid-flight and definitely won’t be swimming any closer to tease him like I do with the other crabs.
I take one glance over my shoulder at the countless fishermen with their empty nets in the water, dreaming of dining on Blue Swimmers that come nowhere near the Jetty. If only they could see this huge aggressive beast, within grabbing distance in the shallows. I turn back for a look and the crab’s already coming for me.
BAM! The Blue has stumbled over another buried Surf crab that instinctively attacks its intruder. There’s a sandy flurry for a second before a dramatic scene is revealed, with the Blue holding the entire Surf crab over its head with both claws. It looks me dead in the eyes no kidding- before tearing the Surf crab into two halves with one brutal motion. It scurries away, victorious.
Bearing witness
Bearing witness this whole time, was a Derwent Flounder. It’s proven much better at staying still in its sandy hiding spot than everyone else so far. I laugh inside my snorkel at its two goofball eyes, sandwiched together at odd, ugly angles like a kid glued it on in an arts-and-crafts class. It realises I’ve noticed it and shoots off sideways into the depths, its tail hitting every groove in the sand bed on the way, making a string of tiny cloud puffs.
“What part of the Nederlands are you from?” says a surprise voice. I’m startled yet again. My goggles are at the feet of an old man standing alone in a Speedo, whom I hadn’t noticed was there.
“Oh, I’m aussie” I reply, partly confused. It’s bizarre to be interacting with another person, all this way out in the middle of essentially nowhere, with the closest other people being colourful dots on the beach. It’s otherwise completely silent except for the quiet lapping of the waves bunching up around the sand bar.
“Oh, look out, there’s an Eagle Ray coming” he says…
We look a little further along the beach to where a family is nervously wading away, as a pair of huge wings flap up above the surface every few seconds. It’s absolutely coming this way, and we’re about to come face to face, but as I say to the old man, already paddling over, “it won’t let me get anywhere near it”.
Underwater, I brace for it to enter my visible horizon from the dark blue ‘shadows’ up ahead. As soon as it begins to fade into view, it’s already noticed me and corrects its course, opting to swim closer to the shore around me. The tide has come in a lot more by now and is throwing us around together. I’ll never forget matching the rays' speed, like stalking a sleek spaceship, fully aware of my presence there but carrying on undisturbed in its mission to nibble the same school fish I met on my way in.
It’s time to get out
It’s time to get out. The water gets warmer and warmer as I beach myself in my wetsuit, reluctant to stand up and leave the toasty shallows.
The air is hot and the sun has baked the sand on the shore into hard biscuits that break beneath my feet as I walk back to my backpack up on the rocks. Visitors to Brighton Beach lick ice-creams and watch as I pack up, sometimes they ask me what I’ve seen in the water. It’s hard not to get over-excited and go into way too much detail about the fish I see. Some joke that they’ll hire snorkels and get in to see the action for themselves.
I walk home in my wetsuit. I spend the rest of my day loosened up by the water, and feeling like I’ve just caught up with a crowd of family and friends. There’s a quiet resolve in knowing I’ll be back to see them all again tomorrow.
About Azzurro
Azzurro has been illustrating for businesses and painting murals for 10 years. When COVID hit in 2020, Azzurro used the downtime as a chance to get up to the cuttlefish at Stony Point.
“I'd been exploring the breeding aggregation for 10 minutes too long, in freezing stormy waters at Stony Point near Whyalla.
“This experience began an obsession with snorkelling in South Australia that's forced me into the water nearly every summer day since then.“
Gradually, Azzuro’s art has become very focused on local marine life.
“It seemed like it was bound to happen, but has taken a while to properly gather its patterns, shapes and palettes. Now I feel that I am finally at a point where I can imagine and realise my own underwater scenes and imagery using all my time spent floating on the waters surface with a snorkel.”
Azzurro’s favourite thing about the Great Southern Reef is how alien the life is compared to the rest of the world.
“So much of the reef life here looks so unrecognisably foreign to anything else on the planet that it's almost hard to even imagine how they came to be an evolutionary offshoot of any common ancestor.”
As a child Azzurro was exposed to marine species like the Leafy as a part of being in an eco primary school (Belair) heavily centered around the environment.
“It was core in forming the understanding that the ecosystems here are profoundly special beyond the norm and need all hands on deck to protect.”
“It concerns me that I've painted the Leafy Seadragon and have had children as old as 8 unable to recognise what it is. I'm carrying that with me in my mission to document local reef life through my marine art.”
Azzurro hopes to provoke solutions and ideas just like they were provoked in him as a child
“I want to build on the broader mission of promoting the Great Southern Reef to the forefronts of the minds that live on dry land around it.”
Deeper Darker Waters exhibition
Azzuro’s second marine solo instalment ‘Deeper Darker Waters’ will launch at the Marine Discovery Centre in Henly Beach from 2-4 pm on Saturday November 26 2022.
“I’ll be giving a fun artist talk at 3pm ‘the Marine Adventures of Azzurro’ chatting about my process, encounters and showing off as much digital art as I can in about 20 mins.”
Tickets are $10 on eventbrite.
Learn about more passionate photographers and artists inspired by the Great Southern Reef.
