Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Lighthouse Park 21/12/2009

I had been planning this dive for some time. Lighthouse Park was listed in my dive book, and seemed like a good spot to check out. The problem was the hike. Whenever I'd mention Lighthouse Point, people seemed less than enthusiastic! There was no road access, so all your stuff had to be lugged down from the parking lot about a kilometre away. The tides and currents were a concern too, so planning was done to find a day with a very small tidal exchange. That turned out to be December 28 between 10 and noon. It also was a holiday for most people, so even better! I ended up having to take the day off anyway though, since for some reason our office was open that day. Oh well.

Here is a Google Map link to the dive site, remember to click on Satellite view if it's not on already.

http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=lighthouse+park+vancouver+bc&sll=49.891235,-97.15369&sspn=25.027097,64.423828&ie=UTF8&hq=lighthouse+park&hnear=Vancouver,+BC&ll=49.330789,-123.261985&spn=0.000771,0.001966&t=h&z=19

We planned to arrive at the Park for 10:30, and brought two wheeled trollies to carry gear with. Ideally, each person should have had one trolly each, but we originally had only two people planned, so Evan and Alan had to share.

While waiting, I met one of the people involved with the park who was out for a walk. She asked if I was going diving, and where. I said yes, and where should I go! She was quite helpful. There were three places to dive, the West Beach, East Beach and Starboat Cove. She said that beach access to West Beach was tricky and the dive wasn't that great. East Beach was easy to get into and a good dive, and Starboat Cove was also a bit tricky to get down into. It was good information that we put to use, picking East Beach as the place we would explore.

Alan and Evan showed up on time, and we assembled all our gear in the parking lot, strapped it to the trollies, and putting on our drysuits too. This was all done to make sure that any obvious failures or missing gear would be spotted immediately. It worked out ok, but the hike was a bit warm with a drysuit on. I think I would still prefer to cart the bags down and assemble gear closer.

The main trail down from the parking lot was quite wide and free of bumps. But, it was a steady and steep downhill hike making the return journey difficult. Be prepared for a work out coming back up! Taking it slow was the way to go. For any reasonably fit person, you'd be ok going down, but probably get pretty tired on the way back. However, after diving you'd need to watch yourself since you'd be more loaded with inert gas.

We stayed on the main trail and followed it down until we came across the park buildings near the Lighthouse driveway. There was a good map in the parking lot, and the trails are well marked. We left our trollies and hiked down to the beach to check out the water and the entry terrain and to take some photos. You couldn't take the trolly much farther than the buildings because the path down to the beach was just a walking trail. It was much like the path down to the Cut entry at Whytecliff, but probably a bit rougher and longer. Down at the water, there was a large granite rock that had three channels branching off of it (you can see it in the Google map above). We decided to enter in the middle channel, follow the bottom south to 21 meters or so, then curve to the north east. We'd aim to end up back near the granite rock at the end. The visibility looked pretty good, and the water didn't look like it was moving much at all either. We seemed to have hit the site at the right time. The area was pretty exposed, so large tidal flows could make the currents very scary.

After a few pictures of which we were sternly told by Alan to not ham it up in, we hiked back up to our gear and decided to wait a bit longer. Partly this was to rest after the hike down, and partly it was to hopefully hit the tidal exchange at the optimal time. There was a nice picnic table near the buildings that made a great place to gear up on. There were bathrooms in the area too, which was a nice convenience. Not that we really needed them with p-valves and Evan and his iron bladder!

The hike down to the water in full gear wasn't too bad. We went slow, and there were no problems. The beach entry was nice and smooth too. We started our descent pretty quickly, and headed south. There were a lot of rock outcroppings along the bottom creating natural channels. It also made straight navigating hard. Going south didn't put us down very deep either, so our plan of hitting 21 meters quickly didn't work out so well. There was also a steady current flowing to the west, which made us turn east sooner to swim into it lest we be pulled too far away from our exit point. We discovered a steep drop off about 15 minutes into the dive on our curve to the east. It started around 21 meters, and probably went down to at least 30 or so. It was a pretty interesting find, but we couldn't stay since I had reached our agreed on turn pressure, and we started to head back up the bottom contour. I did a pretty good job navigating I think, as we ended up not too far off. Our exit ended up being the eastern rock channel that you can see on the Google map link. In the end, we agreed that this channel would be the best to enter from instead of the middle channel. Heading south from this channel should put you right near the interesting drop off, and we planned to do that soon.

Evan was designated as “crab master” as he had brought along his crabbing bag. Unfortunately, there were no suitable crabs to be found. Alan had his camera, and was “photo master” and I was “nav master”. Alan got some pretty good pictures I think. There was a fair amount of interesting life, too. We saw golf-ball crabs, hermit crabs, giant barnacles, rock scallops, brittle stars, purple sea stars, purple sea urchins, pacific sea peaches, great sculpins, grunt sculpins, and a squid. Well, I didn't see the squid, but Evan and Alan did. I also found a very interesting old square bottle which I hope to clean up as a souvenir.

We agreed that two dives would be good to plan, because of the effort to get down there. One dive seemed a bit of a waste!

We made a plan to get out to Lighthouse Park again, and explore the drop off we discovered soon!

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