Artefacts Flood is a treasure-hunt drift over the sand of Ticonderoga Bay, the anchorage off the Point Nepean Quarantine Station where immigrant ships lay for a century from the 1850s. The Scuba Doctor listing describes 'a treasure-hunt experience over an area where various artefacts are visible on the seafloor' – items that 'continuously shift position as sand covers and uncovers them, creating an ever-changing underwater landscape' – and notes that most were probably discarded from ships moored at the quarantine station during its operation. Depth is 10–15 m and the dive is run on the flood, which carries the group east through the bay toward Portsea.

What surfaces from the sand is the ordinary rubbish of Victorian shipboard life: bottles of every shape, clay pipes and jugs, plates and cups, iron fittings, cartridge cases – the same material catalogued on the Quarantine Station Reef to the south-west, where White Star and P&O china has been recorded. It is all protected under heritage law and the rule of the dive is to look and photograph and leave everything where it lies. The sand itself is the habitat of the bay's soft-bottom animals: stingrays and fiddler rays, spider crabs in their autumn–winter aggregations, sand octopus, flathead, goatfish, and the short-headed seahorses and pipefish that live in the scattered sponges and weed.

It is an easy, shallow, sheltered dive that operators use as a second dive or for drift instruction, and clubs run it as a photographic scavenger hunt. On a day when the Heads are out and the piers are crowded, it is one of the more interesting sheltered options on the Portsea side, and it pairs naturally with Cattle Jetty Drift and the Quarantine Station Reef.

Boat access, five minutes from Portsea Pier by charter or 10–15 minutes from Sorrento ramp. Run as a group drift on the flood under a flagged float with the boat following, starting near the Quarantine Station end and drifting east toward Portsea over the sand. Dive flag essential – the ferry route and South Channel are just north.

Private boats should anchor only at the end of the drift, well clear of the channel markers, and pick up the group from the float.

A flood-tide drift, run when the incoming tide is moving at 0.5–1 knot through Ticonderoga Bay toward Portsea; no slack-water requirement, but spring floods run too fast for comfort. Slack water at Port Phillip Heads does not coincide with high or low water: it falls roughly three hours after high or low water at Point Lonsdale, and the usable window is typically 20–40 minutes. Use the Ports Victoria / Port of Melbourne slack-water predictions for The Heads (also republished by charter operators and WillyWeather 'Rip Bank') rather than a standard tide table.

Sheltered from all but northerlies; visibility 5–15 m, and the sand lifts easily so it is best after a few settled days. The artefacts appear and disappear with sand movement, so a visit after a winter storm often shows most.

Descend the float line to the sand at 10–12 m on the young flood and drift east, scanning the bottom either side of the line for bottles, ceramics and metal emerging from the sand; look, photograph, leave in place. The boat retrieves the group from the float after 40–45 minutes.

Dive Victoria Group and Bayplay (Portsea) – occasional flood-tide drift and second dive; private boats from Sorrento; club 'treasure hunt' dives.