The Pinnacle

The Pinnacle is a well known site that prior to the ex-HMAS Adelaide, was visited very often by all the local commercial operators. It is a beautiful site with great reef structure and diverse fish and macro life.

As the name implies, The Pinnacle is a mound of reef starting at ~25m and the interesting diving is up to ~20m. Their are a few ways to dive the site. You can circumnavigate The Pinnacle in a dive easily, just take note of the depth of the anchor before you set off. You can head off away from The Pinnacle and you will find large boulders covered in fixed growth that are interesting to explore or you can just potter your way around the site looking for Macro life in all the fixed growth at the site. Look carefully through the Bryozoan (the fluffy kind, Iodictyum phoeniceum, Purple Bryozon) and you will find Sea Spiders at this site. The site also usually turns up some pretty cool Nudibranchs as well.

The fish life you will commonly encounter at this site includes:

• White Ear Parma (Parma microlepis)
• Longfin Pike (Dinolestes lewini)
• Red Morwong (Cheilodactylus fuscus)
• Half Banded Seaperch (Hypoplectrodes maccullochi)
• Mado (Atypichthys strigatus)
• Yellow-Tail Scad (Trachurus novaezelandiae)
• Blue Wrasse-Grouper (Achoerodus viridis)
• Maori Wrasse (Ophthalmolepis lineolata)
• Eastern Hulafish (Trachinops taeniatus)
• Old Wife (Enoplosus armatus)

The GPS mark for this site is S33º23.382' E151º30.187' (WGS84 hdddºmm.mmm'). Seek to anchor at the bottom of the Pinnacle in ~24m. The site has at times also had a mooring present, put in place by Terrigal Dive.

The Pinnacle is one of the premier dives on the Central Coast and certainly within my personal Top 10 favourites locally.