Middle Brighton Pier is the busiest dive site on the inner eastern shore of Port Phillip and the classic Melbourne training and night-dive location. The pier runs out from the foot of Park Street with a rock breakwater on its northern side that encloses the Royal Brighton Yacht Club marina; together they create sheltered water with more relief than the open sand piers to the north. The pylons themselves are not especially rich, but the breakwater is: its boulders form ledges and holes from the surface to about 6 m that shelter blennies, moonlighters, zebrafish, leatherjackets, old wives, sea stars, sea urchins, decorator crabs and, with some searching, short-head seahorses and pipefish, plus octopus, cuttlefish and dumpling squid after dark.

The head of the pier reaches about 8 m over sand and shell grit where fiddler rays, flathead and stingarees settle. Fauna is much the same as at the South Road reefs a kilometre south. The pier is lit at night and the yacht club precinct is well kept, which is why Melbourne's dive shops use it for night-dive courses and social dives, and why it can be crowded with training groups on weekend mornings.

Ascend along the back wall in the shallows at the end of the dive and you get a view of the CBD skyline across the water. Combine it with the sea baths next door, which are a separate, even more sheltered dive, and with Green Point and South Road reefs to the south for a full day without leaving Brighton.

From the CBD take Beach Road or the Nepean Highway to Brighton (about 25 minutes) and turn onto the Esplanade at Middle Brighton; the pier car park is at the end of Park Street opposite the sea baths. Parking is pay-and-display all year including public holidays (machines take cards) and fills fast on warm days, so midweek or evenings are easier. The carry from the car park to the pier is about 100 m along a paved ramp.

Enter by the ladders at the first or second landing on the pier (the water is too shallow for a giant stride) or walk in down the gentle ramp beside the sea baths and swim across. Exit by the same ladders or the ramp.

The marina's northern breakwater and the shallow water to the north protect the pier from northerlies, and it is comfortably diveable in easterlies and south-easterlies and often in north-westerlies. Strong southerlies and south-westerlies send chop into the entrance and stir the bottom; give it a miss then. Visibility is usually 3-6 m, best at the top of the tide and in the cooler months; runoff after rain reduces it.

No swell. Marina traffic is constant, so stay under the pier or on the breakwater and fly a flag.

Descend the ladder at the first landing, follow the pylons out along the northern side to the end (about 8 m), cross to the breakwater wall and work back along its base, checking crevices, then ascend along the back wall in the shallows near the ramp. Keep out of the marina fairway. Plan 45 minutes and turn at half gas at the pier head.

No regular commercial operator – dived independently and by Melbourne dive clubs and shop social-dive programs (Scuba Culture, Aquability, Melbourne Diving Services run occasional shore-dive nights at bayside piers); Ricketts Point-based snorkel tours run separately. Scuba Culture and Aquability list Brighton among their regular club night-dive venues.