Rockingham Dive Trail 2024
About Rockingham Dive Trail
TLWR (too long won’t read)? Watch the 1 min 35 secs video - Rockingham Drive Trail 2024
👩‍🦰 The Rockingham Dive Trail is one of the most popular Perth dive spots, conveniently located off Churchill Park on the Rockingham foreshore in Western Australia. The dive site has a number of wrecks to explore, including 2 small planes, 2 boats, 2 chicken coops and a few tyre reefs. All of the wrecks are easily accessible to PADI open water divers at depths of between 10 and 18 metres.
This accessibility combined with sheltered conditions in most wind scenarios make it a favourite for both Perth diving school lessons and local diving enthusiasts. There’s a great grassed spot for gearing up, plenty of nearby parking, and easy access to the beach via 15-20 small stairs.
Though visibility tends to be low, savvy divers seek to avoid the weekend crowd for optimal diving conditions on weekdays.
How to Get There
Rockingham Dive Trail is located about 40 minutes south of Perth CBD. Type Churchill Park Parking into Google Maps and it’ll take you to the carpark closest to the dive trail, located on the intersection of Rockingham Beach Road and Flinders Lane. Look for the sphere feature at the end of the carpark to check if you’re in the right spot.
Churchill Park Parking - best spot to access Rockingham Dive Trail
There are only 23 regular carparks and 2 handicap spots which fill up quickly, but there is plenty of street parking along Rockingham Beach Road and on adjacent roads if you can’t snag one in Churchill Park Parking like we managed to.
Bring all of your gear to the grassed spot closest to the stairs so you’ll have less distance to walk with all your gear on.
I was so excited to get back in the water for a scuba! Conditions were great - clear sunny skies, moderate water temp of 21.4, and as we arrived (at about 2pm on a Sunday at the end of April) there were 3 groups of dive schools all leaving.
The Rockingham Dive Trail Layout
When you hit the sand, you’ll be able to easily see the markers for each of the scuttled wrecks and a dive flag located at the best spot to descend, around 100-120m from the shore.
Rockingham Dive Site Map as of Feb, 2022. Credit: Rockingham Wreck Trail maintenance team
The article that I read suggested not putting your fins on too early in the shallows which gets up to 2m depth but I popped mine on pretty quickly as being only 5’3 I was struggling a bit! I just used my snorkel to make my way through the shallows then it drops off pretty quickly with the dive flag to descend at between at around 11m depth.
By the time we submerged we had the trail completely to ourselves! I had issues descending at first. I realise now that I’ve never worn my 5mm 2 piece with both pieces at once, so I’ll have to invest in some more weights! Once we descended though it was all peachy.
Although we had the trail to ourselves, Rockingham Dive Trail is known for having pretty poor visibility due to the heavy scuba traffic that it gets - for our dive we had between 2-3 metres visibility. It is very silty so try to keep a little distance between you and the surface to avoid kicking up clouds of sand and silt and ruining the visibility even further. It’s also a good idea to bring a torch with you!
Using a torch for added visibility
Scuba Diving at the Rockingham Dive Trail
Once you descend, you’ll be directly on top of the Cessna plane, buried in the sand with just the top sticking out of the sand. There are a couple of different ropes that you can take as per the map above. We made our way to the big tyre reef which takes you to a depth of around 14m. At about 3m high by 6m long it is the largest of the tyre formations and had a few pretty fish swimming about it.
Big Tyre Reef
From here, we continued following the rope into deeper water, heading towards the Old Timer boat. At around 17-18m deep, it is the deepest spot on the trail and my favourite wreck, as you can swim inside and come out through the top. I even had my own Titanic moment on the bow.
“I’m flying, Jack!”
Our last stop was the MV Target, the smaller of the 2 boats and the furthest South of all the wrecks at about 11m. It was a nice wreck with quite a few fish around and it was really pretty to look through all the holes where the windows were watching the fish swim by in the frames.
By this point I had no idea where we were or how we got there (my navigational skills are terrible, even above the water!) but I checked my air and struggling to descend must’ve used more air than I realised so I signalled that we had to cut the dive short and we made our way to the safety stop rope while Aaron took a nap during our short decompress stop.
Sleeping with the fishes.
Though the visibility was poor, I really enjoyed this dive spot. There was a lot of interesting wildlife to see and the wrecks make it fun to explore the different spots. Aaron had never visited before either so we’ll definitely come again and make sure we get to the bits that we missed out this time due to my lack of air.
Have you visited Rockingham Dive Trail? Tell us about your experience below in the comments.