Bill Silvester, Lennox Head
One hot summers day in 1960 four Victorians drove a Holden sedan to Surfers Paradise for a holiday. We did not like what we found there as we were looking for somewhere we could dive and spear fish. Surfers even then was busy and we had nowhere to stay. Bob Hooper and I looked at a map of northern NSW, saw that there were a group of rocks not too far offshore. These rocks looked like an ideal place for a dive.
We had built homemade SCUBA gear back in Melbourne and just needed to find somewhere ideal to use them. The Julian Rocks at Byron Bay beckoned us, so we left the Gold Coast and off to Byron Bay we drove. First finding a low-cost camp site behind the sand dunes at Clarke’s Beach we booked in for the night. At that time a mighty athletic sportsman, Hal Hankin, owned a shoe repair and sports store in Jonson street. He was one of Byron Bay’s most talented long board surfers, but also owned his own boat to go fishing. By luck for us Hal agreed to take us out in his boat and let us SCUBA dive the Julian Rocks but only at 6:30am the next day. A warm morning with just a light northerly breeze blowing, Hal drove his boat to The Julian Rocks to then anchor at the reef known as the Nursery. Hal pointed eastwards to a place he called the Cod Hole and indicated that it was there where all the big fish were. We took spearguns and swam in the appointed direction.
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