Apollo Marine Park is a place of cool, shallow waters, huge south-westerly swells, strong tidal flows and foraging seabirds. For sailors, it is one of the most notorious stretches of water in the world. This marine park protects an area of continental shelf at the western entrance to Bass Strait. During the last ice age, about 18,000 years ago, this area was part of an ancient lake and river system. One of the old river valleys is now a 100 metres deep undersea valley called the Otway Depression.

The marine park is south of Cape Otway and covers 1,184 square kilometres. It is a Multiple Use zone. – Parks Australia

Apollo ranges from 47 to 101 metres depth, with an average depth of 88 metres. The majority of the Park (99%) falls within the rariphotic zone (70-200 metres) [view on map]. The mapped areas of the seafloor are dominated by Plane (50%) and Slope (12%) morphological features [view on map].

Based on annotations from publicly available seafloor imagery (Squidle+), the five most dominant seafloor categories in this Park are:

• Mesophotic: sand (31%), mixed invertebrate community (21%), sponges (7%), non-coral cnidaria (2%), bryozoans (2%)
• Rariphotic: sand (95%), mixed invertebrate community (3%), consolidated hard substrata (1%), sponges (1%), bryozoans (<1%)

Read more about the Apollo State of Knowledge (Parks Australia).