Alas, there would be no diving of the HMCS Saskatchewan and Cape Breton this weekend. A weather system had moved in, and there were wind warnings all through the area. Too bad! Rescheduling might happen, but it looks like those wrecks will have to wait for now.
On the upside, I'm glad I planned a dive of Kelvin Grove on Saturday. There had been some controversy in the news lately about the dive site, because the village of Lion's Bay issued a by-law prohibiting divers from using the beach access. Apparently, residents were saying that divers were behaving inappropriately and being a nuisance. But, the Village backed off, and the by-law was not to be enforced so diving was back on again. I'm glad, since it turned out to be a nice little dive site.
Here is a Google Map link. Make sure to choose “Satellite View” from the top right corner to see more details.
I was diving with Jason Kolba again today, and we arrived fairly early, around 9am. We took a quick walk down to the beach to check out the site since I'd not been there before. He had dove it twice before. It was quite a steep walk down, but the path was paved and there was a washroom too so that was nice. What was not so nice was a big square concrete slab covering a large septic system! It smelled quite a bit. We ended up gearing up on top of that just because it was a nice clear surface, but the smell was annoying. I got the impression the system had been built many many years ago when no one was very concerned about it. There was a disconcerting sign beside the beach proclaiming in large letters “Sewage Outflow”, too. Nice layout! It didn't look like the outflow was used very often, though. I hoped it only went periodically, and that it wasn't this day.
There were another pair of divers there, and we met them coming out as we were going in. I believe one of their names was Dave. They were diving double cylinders, and told us that the visibility was very good that day. Encouraging to hear after seeing that sewage sign!
The plan for the first dive was to go to the right hand side of the small bay. There was a rock wall there that was supposed to be interesting. Before we went down, I checked the bottom with my mask on, and thought that I had a leak. When I put my face under, there was an odd wavy look to everything. It took me a bit to realize that it was a halocline caused by run-off from a nearby culvert. It was pretty cool.
On the descent, I focused my light but couldn't figure out why the light beam wasn't as pin-point as it should be. I messed around with it some more and realized that I had focused it past the point it should be at. I had no idea that that could happen! Something new learned there. The dive itself lasted about half an hour, and we were down around 27 metres. I was surprised to see so many boot sponges on the wall. I guess it was prime filter feeder area with that sewage sometimes! I tried to look in every crack and crevice I saw, since there were supposed to be octopii and wolf eels there. No luck, though. There were the usual ling cods and copper rock fish, but nothing extraordinary. I do remember peering off into the depths of a particularly shear portion of the wall. Floating weightless out in the blackness were several copper rock fish. They looked very cool like that. The whole wall was also covered in a thin layer of brown particulate matter, so it wasn't as “clean” looking as other walls I've experienced. On our ascent, we practised one minute stops at three metre intervals to get more practice with buoyancy control. It went pretty well, and I was pleased.
It was an overcast day, and the weather had called for a lot of rain but we lucked out. It didn't rain at all, and actually cleared up some with the sun peaking out later in the afternoon. We had some lunch and changed our cylinders and geared up for the second dive. I convinced Jason to go to the left side, even though he said it was boring. The visibility was good, so I figured that would help things and I wanted to see first hand both sides of the dive site.
I led the second dive, and indeed the dive was a bit dull. There were large expanses of fairly barren white sand, punctuated by some rock outcroppings. We did find the wall that was supposed to be there, and it turned out to be at least as interesting as the right side. Mainly I wanted to hunt for some more octopii, but they were not to be found. I ended up finding two sets of discarded fishing line on the bottom that I cleaned up, lest it harm some poor creature. There was a particularly brilliant chiton, more white than purple though. That was the closest picture I could find of it. There were also some particularly nice white nudibranchs. That's not an exact picture, but it's close. Basically it was a relaxing dive, where I worked on my frog kicks and buoyancy. I tried to hover as close to the bottom without touching as possible, which is a good exercise. We swam along the bottom all the way back and up the contours, so I was also pleased with my underwater navigating. My compass came in handy! On the way back, we found a red rock crab, which I'd never seen before. There was also a new red fish that neither of us had come across before. However, I have completely forgotten what it looked like! There's something to be said for having some kind of camera underwater, that's for sure.
When we got onto the surface, we noticed two seals out where we had been. We swam back out a bit to see if we could meet up with them, but they disappeared pretty quickly. Oh well!
We packed things up and were on our way home nice and early. We both agreed that it had been a pretty successful set of dives. Now, I have to get onto planning for those wrecks outside of Nanaimo!
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