Hastings Pier is the working heart of Western Port's fishing town, and it is included here as a curiosity rather than a destination: The Scuba Doctor lists it as a 3–5 m pier dive in a crescent-shaped bay that opens onto Western Port and gives protection from the prevailing winds, with the iconic 1866 fishing shed still standing on the sand at the pier entrance. The seabed under and around the pier is mud and sand with seagrass patches, and the pylons carry the muted growth of a silty estuarine bay rather than the sponge gardens of the ocean piers. What lives here is largely fish that anglers know: King George whiting, Australian salmon, silver trevally and flathead move through on the tide, with squid, gobies, small crabs and the occasional ray on the bottom, and the muddy substrate is good for burrowing life – shrimps, worms and the animals that feed on them.

The dive is entirely governed by Western Port's tides, which are the largest on the peninsula: the inner bay dries at low water, the ebb runs hard, and visibility, never good, collapses as soon as the tide turns. Diving at the top of a spring tide after a dry spell is the only way to see anything. Hastings suits divers who collect piers, local divers who want a quick tidal-bay dive with easy access, and anyone interested in the estuarine habitat that makes Western Port an internationally recognised wetland; it has nothing to offer a visitor with only a day on the peninsula, who should go to Flinders instead.

Hastings is 70 km from Melbourne via the Mornington Peninsula Freeway and Frankston–Flinders Road; the pier is at the eastern end of Skinner Street off Marine Parade. Park in the car park at the base of the pier, beside the historic fishing shed, and gear up there – the water is 50 m away. Enter from the beach beside the pier or from a ladder along it at high tide, when there is 3–5 m under the outer section; at low tide much of the inner bay is mudflat.

Exit the same way. Public toilets are nearby on the foreshore.

The crescent-shaped bay protects the pier from the prevailing south-westerlies and westerlies, and the source notes it offers protection from prevailing winds; easterly and north-easterly winds blow across Western Port onto it and stir the silt. The overriding factor is tide: Western Port has a range of up to 3 m, the inner bay dries to mud at low water, and the ebb runs hard through the channels, so dive on the top of the tide – ideally the last of the flood into high-water slack – and expect visibility to fall as soon as the ebb starts. Rain in the catchment turns the water brown for days.

Boat traffic from the Hastings marina and ramp is constant.

Enter at high-water slack beside the pier, follow the pylons out to the head in 3–5 m, spend the dive within the pier's footprint where the structure holds the fish, and return along the other side before the ebb builds; do not attempt the Red Bird wreck swim without local knowledge, as it is largely buried and the tide runs across the flats.

No regular operator; independent divers and occasional clubs. Hastings is the home of Western Port's fishing fleet rather than a dive centre.