Sydney: where to live to enjoy shore diving

[Nicool]

Hi there!

I am considerating to migrate to Australia, and settle down in Sydney with (diving) wife and kids. I am writing to seek advice on which suburbs would be best to live, based on our tricky familial setup - see below.

Tricky setup - The plan
Indeed, both wifey and myself are avid scuba divers (500+ dives each), but we are also parents to two young lovely kids (3 years old and 6 months old).
So forget about those nice week-ends dedicated to diving in various Australian states, our more realistic setup in the coming few years would be (i think) one dive per week-end, preferably a long one like 2-3 hours to enjoy ourselves (we dive rebreathers and have wetsuit, so no much issue staying long). We aren't particularly looking for deep dives, our priority is to see lots of marine life, even if it's in 5 meters depth (we're both doing underwater photography)!
To achieve this, we plan to look for a baby-sitter that we would hire during 4, maybe 5 hours each weekend (or sometimes for an evening during the week, in case we go night diving instead of day-diving).
To allow for longdives, we have to be careful with the commuting time from home to the good shore dives.
For instance, i've seen it can take 1h30 mins to drive from South Sydney to some suburbs in North East Sydney, which obviously wouldn't work! Based on our intended setup i think the commuting time from home to dive sites should be maximum 1 hour, better if 30 minutes.
Last important dimension to the problem: our work places are likely to be around central station and around the airport.

Looking for advice
Better than asking a real-estate agent, i thought i would seek advice within the diving community.
(If there's one real-estate diving agent around then great ;-))
When searching online i find lots of shore dive sites in Sydney, but from the description they are all "great" and "interesting", hard to tell which are the really good ones.
So pointing me to the very best dive sites would already be helpful. I am happy to focus on 3-4 dive sites only.
But if you can advice some of the most convenient suburbs to enjoy those, that would be even greater.

thanks a lot!
Nicolas

 

[Nicool]

Looks like my question was too specific to get an answer

Could i just get opinions on where are the best shore dives located in Sydney (in my book, that means the ones with most wildlife/j'derwater photography opportunities)?

I appreciate it's possible to shore dive in several arras of Sydney, but locals might consider that generally, dives are much better in one particular area.

That's the kind of insight i am after - thanks!!

 

[MA]

Michael is a regular on here and has an amazing reference of dive sites. Perhaps read through this to see what suits!!

Michael McFadyen's Scuba Diving Web Site

But if you haven't already, do a search in this section for Sydney diving. There have been similar posts over the years.

 

[MA]

Here also is a link to a thread I started a couple of years ago in this section, which is asking pretty much the same question. It is unlikely anything will have changed since that time. I did not end up moving up there so cannot assist with first hand info.

Local Sydney Diving - North or South?

 

[Nicool]

Great! Thanks so much