Wellington is surrounded by water and has a large number of dive sites in easy reach.
So join in with the club and stake a flag in a favourite spot or find a new place to explore.
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. the club details of a site you enjoyed and we share it with other club members.
The following link takes you to a Google "My Maps" page with a lot of dive site information
Wellington's South Coast - Google My Maps
Initial "My Maps" created by Jeff Grove.
Dive information kindly created and shared by Pete Humphries.
WUC member: Sophie Mormede
Octopress: Autumn 2024
Dive site: Breaker Bay
One of my favourite Wellington sites, best done at high tide for easier access, also one of the last south coast sites to lose the swell and surge. It's outside of the marine reserve so has less fish than elsewhere on the south coast and meeting a spearo in the corridors can be unsettling. Also far less sea tulips than there used to be, yet the long corridor makes for amazing lights and colours, with walls covered in anemones, nudis... The deeper reef is more open and has more fish life as well as some remnant kelp forest.
WUC member: Erin Hewetson
Octopress: Winter 2024
Dive site: Hole in the Wall, Kapiti Island
Rolling backwards from the boat I’m excited and anxious to begin my first dive at Kapiti Island. I hit the water and its fresh, but not too cold, as we’re lucky to have the sun beaming down on us today. Fur seals watch us closely from the rocks nearby, cautious of these clumsy looking humans weighed down by all their gear. We begin our descent, below us a golden-brown carpet of seaweed looks as though it could fully envelop us if we let it.
Swimming towards the reef wall, barely 10 metres from the water’s surface a hole in the wall appears with an entrance large enough to accommodate a diver (or two). Swimming into this entrance we’re greeted by jewel anemones, nudibranchs, and sponges of all colours lining the cave walls. This cave is expansive and doesn’t feel at all claustrophobic, only encouraging me to stay and explore.
We keep swimming through the cave and eventually the roof opens into a canyon with seaweed covered walls either side of us. I look up and spy fur seals swimming above and then remember a trick a friend once told me – if you spin around in the water, you might convince the seals to come down and play. Tumbling about I made myself dizzy but also invited one of the seals to come down and play, coming nose-to-nose with a whiskered sea dog.
My favourite local dive site is one that I can’t visit every weekend, but this only adds to the charm for me. When the weather and timing aligns, I get to experience a site that feels like another world but is only an hour or so from home.
As a dive club, we are lucky to have access to Kapiti Island’s undersea world thanks to Duckling Charters. If you get the opportunity, I highly recommend making the time to visit this hole in the wall, it might just become your favourite site as well!
WUC member: Alison Grant
Octopress: Autumn 2025
Dive site: South Sea wreck, Wellington Harbour
If I'm honest, I can't give you one favourite dive site in Wellington. We are too replete with options, and I can be just as happy exploring the wrecks of Ōwhiro, the mussel ropes, weedline and Mazda wreck of Mahanga, or the looming walls of Breaker Bay's Butterfish Rock. But one site has delighted me on every visit, day or night, and it's far from Wellington's best known; I adore the South Sea minesweeper wreck sitting upright on the silty bottom of Wellington Harbour (1500m ENE of Pt Halswell -41.279, 174.843, according to my dive computer) for its ease of navigation, the whole-body experience of the interisland ferries rumbling past and the cacophony of pastel encrusting life on its hull.
It makes little difference whether you're there to dive night or day, as you won't see daylight regardless – treat it as a night dive and take two torches at least. The dive starts by dropping directly onto the wreck, so as not to get lost in the gloom, but once there, the wreck is perfectly sized for a simple circumnavigation (this is not a place to try your wreck penetration skills), with detours deeper and shallower to peer into holes and across the hazard-laced remaining deck (the upper decks were removed for the safety of the shipping lane.)
With torchlight the effect is anything but gloomy, despite the surrounding black-green. As your narrow torch beam illuminates the advancing curve of the hull you could be almost anywhere in time and space. The South Sea's all encompassing encrusting cover is a tumult of texture and colour, but it's not bright. Silken fabrics, delicate pastel lacework, shimmering filaments of lavender, peach, lemon yellow and rich cream; the life here is ancient, alien, unfamiliar, and somehow enticing. After one visit I found myself moved to write poetry for the first time in years; though hardly rare around Aotearoa, here the dead man's finger corals seem to reach with particular intentionality, and it's hard to believe that the various pillowy textures will sting, not support you if you burrow in.
Seasonally I have seen the wreck a refuge for thousands of juvenile sea perch, several per torch beam tucked in the embroidered layers of sponges and ascidians. In another season it was gold-rimmed nudibranches punctuating the wreck in their hundreds. My last dive, the striped anemones were the richest purple and russet orange, and the largest I've ever seen in the species, setoff by the delicate white octocorals that colonise the upper edges of the wreck.
This is a dive to take slowly. 45 minutes will let you complete a circuit of the wreck and return to the line just ahead of your NDL, stopping to admire a hundred delicate oddities will catch the attention of your light along the way. If you are lucky enough to feel the passing ferry vibrating your bones, you'll wonder yet how the filmy lacework and silk tapestry isn't ripped apart with every passing trip.
