The Steps is the seadragon dive by which Sydney divers measure all others. Set on the southern side of the Botany Bay entrance directly opposite Bare Island, it takes its name from the stairway that descends the cliff from the Inscription Point car park at Captain Cook's Landing Place, where Cook first stepped ashore in 1770. Below the platform a kelp bed on boulders gives way to a boulder field whose rocks are covered in some of the most prolific sponge gardens in the city – sea fans, lace coral, ascidians and nudibranchs on every face – with overhangs and small swim-throughs at 7–9 m.

North of the boulders the sand begins at about 10 m and slopes east to 15 m, and it is along this sand edge, in small bays cut back into the reef, that the common seadragons live. Counts of fourteen to twenty were routine in the 2000s; numbers have declined since about 2010 but the site remains the most reliable in Sydney, and pregnant males carrying eggs are seen from late winter into spring. The reddish weed on the boulders holds Sydney pygmy pipehorses, and wide-bodied pipehorses, sawtooth pipefish and even robust ghost pipefish have turned up.

Stingrays, flathead, leatherjackets, bream, wrasse, sergeant baker, blue groper, moray eels and cuttlefish are everywhere, and grey nurse sharks, hawksbill turtles and seals make occasional appearances. Depths are modest and the route is a simple out-and-back along the sand edge, so it suits Open Water divers, but the platform entry and exit are unforgiving in north-easterly swell or at high tide, and the climb back up the stairs in full kit is a workout. It is the first dive of a classic Kurnell day – Steps, then Monuments – and one of the great temperate shore dives anywhere.

McFadyen treats Inscription Point and The Steps as the same site; the drift from here to The Monuments is a separate entry.

Enter Kamay Botany Bay National Park at Kurnell (vehicle fee, gates lock at night) and drive about 1.5 km along the main park road to the car park signed Inscription Point; in the middle of the car park a stairway leads halfway down the cliff. Gear up at the car, take the stairs, then follow the walkway and small boardwalk west to the rock platform below the car park. Enter off the platform, surface-swim 20 m towards Bare Island and descend into the kelp and boulders.

Exit at the same spot, using the large boulder noted on the way out as your marker. Get there early on weekends.

Protected from southerly swell by the Kurnell headland, so it is a southerly-weather site. Forget it in north-easterly swell over 1–1.5 m or south-easterly swell over about 3 m, which wrap into the entrance and make the platform entry and especially the exit dangerous; McFadyen's rule of thumb is that if the Captain Cook wave buoy reads over about 1 m the exit will be a problem, and high tide makes the exit harder even with small waves. Best on an incoming tide, entering about an hour before high for visibility, which now averages 10–12 m and can reach 20–25 m; it was only 6 m in the 1990s.

Park gates lock at night – no night dives. Seagrass blooms (e.g. November 2023) can obscure the bottom.

Swim 20 m out, descend in the kelp and boulders, head north to the sand at about 10 m and follow the sand edge east to 15 m, searching the small 'bays' in the reef for seadragons. Turn at half air, ascend to 11 m and the sand patch, work west through the shallow boulders, overhangs and gully at 7–9 m, and surface in the kelp at 3 m to swim back to the platform.

Abyss Scuba Diving, Pro Dive Cronulla and Coogee, Sydney Dive Academy, Frog Dive and Dive Centre Bondi all run seadragon dives and courses here weekly; the most popular Kurnell site with independents.