Shining a light on South Australia’s underwater wonderland

And the Team Leader – Park Strategy and Establishment with the National Parks and Wildlife Service has certainly spent plenty of time under the waves in friendlier climes, working for years as a dive guide on the iconic Great Barrier Reef before moving to Hawaii with his American wife Liz.

But, as the saying goes, you can take the boy out of the western suburbs but you can’t take the western suburbs out of the boy so now the Burnell clan all live in Tennyson and Andy continues to find joy in the waters that he fell in love with as a boy.

When he’s not doing his day job Andy can generally be found either on or in the water, exploring in his kayak or diving, both scuba and free.

And, luckily for us more land-based humans, Andy began recording his adventures and publishing them on his Crab.e.cam Facebook page which now has more than 25,000 followers from across SA, Australia and the globe.

It began with a Go-Pro lowered to the bottom from a kayak to record the often hilarious antics of crabs and squid fighting over a pilchard, but has since expanded into a site featuring Andy’s dives where he records all creatures great and small.

Particularly small – he loves finding the little critters that are easily missed. A little like SA’s coastal attractions.

“South Australia’s home to me, and one of the most interesting things for me is that I think it’s just perennially undervalued,” Andy says.

“Even us South Australian’s do it, we always think somewhere else is maybe better.

“But draw the line of the Australian coastline in your head it’s basically a boring curve from Western Australia all the way to South Australia and then there’s a couple of great, really big wiggles and there’s a big island, and then it’s another boring curve that goes around to New South Wales.

“So if you draw it like that and you ask them which is the most interesting bit they’ll usually say ‘oh, South Australia’.”

And Crab.e.cam, Andy says, is a great way to share this incredible coastline.

“I was just doing it for myself dropping a camera down on the crab pots, and then a few people said, ‘oh, that’s awesome, you should post it somewhere’.

“So I put it up one day in the local Facebook group, then an ABC journo latched onto it and did a story on it and it sort of went nuts at that point.”

And on one particular occasion Andy recorded a little more than he bargained for, but he didn’t even know until he reviewed the footage later that day.

“I was experimenting with towing my GoPro on the end of a fishing line behind my kayak, trying to get something similar to a drone shot,” he says.

“I got home and started going through the footage thinking I would delete it all, and suddenly there’s a great white!”

Upon watching all the footage (pictured below) it became obvious that the shark had been following and checking out Andy’s kayak for at least 10 minutes.

“If only I had the camera facing the other way, then I would have got the most incredible footage,” he says.

When Andy’s not filming huge sharks and tiny seahorses he’s working in the Department for Environment and Water as the Team Leader, Park Strategy and Establishment.

And while his role – working on acquiring new parcels of land to incorporate into our National Parks system – often sees him working at a desk he does still get opportunities to go bush and see spectacular parts of SA.

“I often get to go and look at properties before we acquire them, so I do still get out of the office a bit,” he says.

“Recently I’ve been to the Murray Mouth and over to Kangaroo Island and up to World’s End Gorge and the Flinders Ranges. I’m lucky in that I get to go out reasonably often.”

The aforementioned World’s End Gorge, near Burra in the Mid North, is set to become a National Park due to a land transfer deal between the State Government and renewable energy company Neoen Australia.

According to Andy it’s a special parcel of land.

“It’s a big, open gorge with standing water through it. In that environment standing water is a rarity so, yeah, it’s quite unusual and unique.”

So what are Andy’s recommendations for people who want to see a little more of what lies beneath the surface of SA’s ocean?

“I think it’s very important, especially if you’re taking children snorkelling, that the first experience is a good one,” he says.

“Look at the weather carefully and if it’s not a great day then go and do something else.

“The sea temperature lags behind the air temperature a bit, so the best time is late summer and into autumn.

“Port Noarlunga Reef is fantastic, that’s a no brainer. Other spots I’d recommend would be Second Valley, I’d throw in Edithburgh as well as that gives you the opportunity to go if the winds are blowing from the opposite direction. There are so many options.”