The Leap to The Steps has got to be the best shore dive in Sydney. It’s definitely for the more experienced, and you need to be relatively good on your air. But if you tick both of those boxes, nothing else comes close (except Bare Island of course).
The dive site is located on the southern headland of Botany Bay and is ocean facing, meaning visibility is generally pretty good. It’s also a drift dive, so you need to dive it on an incoming tide so that you can ride the current to the Steps (rather than out to sea).
As we do once or twice a year, a group of 6 of us decided to head down early on Sunday morning. We met at The Steps parking lot, geared up, and did the mandatory buddy checks. These are always important, but they’re doubly as important at the Leap, because once you giant stride off that rock platform, there’s no way to get back out. So if you’ve forgotten anything, or your weighting is wrong, too bad, so sad. It’s a long surface swim to The Steps for you.
The Leap was a thrill from the get-go. We walked along the road from The Steps to The Leap, and then made our way down the metal staircase and onto the rock platform. One by one we giant-strided off the rock ledge, into the cool ocean water, being sure to time it with the incoming swell. Once we were all in, we swam out 50 odd meters and then dropped down the to bottom in around 10 meters of water. Visibility was a decent 10-12 meters, and we’d somehow managed to drop straight onto once of our favourite swim-throughs, which was a great start.
After making our way through the swim-through, we descended down the wall to a sandy bottom at 22 meters. Other than the wall, which is the main attraction of this dive, there are boulders scattered all over the place, as well as overhangs and more swim-throughs.
We’d timed the tides perfectly and we didn’t even need to kick as we were pushed westward along the wall towards The Steps. The marine life was out in full force. Schools of yellowtail scad, a variety of nudibranchs, octopus, leatherjackets, sea tulips, seahorses, groper, and so much more. And of course we spotted a few of my all-time favourites; weedy seadragons swaying over the sand like pieces of kelp.
Finding the exit is always interesting. You shallow up throughout the dive, and when you get to roughly 12 meters (give or take 40 minutes into the dive) you need to look for a rock with a clean crack through the middle, commonly known as Split Rock. Once you find that, you can follow it up to the Steps, remembering to do your safety stop. If you don’t find it, you can generally surface anywhere in the area and surface swim over to The Steps.
Getting out is a little tricky, and can be made ever harder if there’s a swell. So it’s always worth checking the exit before starting this dive. You can either step up onto the rock if you have long legs, or beach yourself, roll onto your knees, and then stand up. And once you’ve managed that, you’ve got the long climb up the stairs back to the car park. But despite the effort involved, it’s definitely worth it!