Monday, December 14, 2009

Porteau Cove 13/12/2009

Back to Porteau Cove! It had been a long time since I dove here, so I figured it was high time to go back. Also, my dive buddy Mihai wanted a place with a bathroom that was still open, hah. Porteau Cove had one bathroom open during the winter, being a scenic stop on the highway and all. But, it was farther than the normal one. We ended up driving up to it because it was cold! Speaking of cold, it was snowing on this day. Not a lot of snow, just flakes in the air. I wanted to have a dive on a day with lots and lots of snow on the ground, but I'd have to wait. The air temperature was around 4 degrees. Thankfully it wasn't too windy. I also wished that I had my thicker undergarment, but it had still not arrived, even though I ordered it back in September.

Before leaving IDC, Genessa mentioned about another dive site beside Furry Creek. I was kind of surprised, since I'd not seen it mentioned in my 151 Dives book. We decided to pass on it today, though. I planned on checking into it later. Apparently it was a fairly easy shore entry, with a wall to explore. She did say something about crossing someone's garden! Maybe that was why it wasn't in the Dive book.

We got going pretty late, so it wasn't until about 12:30 that we got into the water. It was high tide, and there was quite a surface current so the swim out to the buoy was long. We stopped for a rest halfway there. Once we got to it, there were two free divers there in wetsuits. I'd never seen anyone free diving in the area yet, let alone in wetsuits on such a cold day! I thought they were pretty crazy, but I guess we were equally as crazy. They were taking photos of each other diving down.

After resting up some more, we dropped down. Our plan was to follow the artificial reef around to the wreck of the Grant Hall, then come back around, look for an octopus, and then follow the bottom back to shore. The plan went a bit awry when Mihai tried to turn his light on near the bottom and found that it was broken. After fiddling with it for a while, he gave up. It was fairly bright, so a light wasn't necessary and it wasn't worth calling the dive on account of that. I lost our orientation when he was fiddling with the light, so we ended up loosing the reef. Whoops. Still, I trusted my compass and struck out where the Grant Hall should be, and it loomed out of the gloom fairly quickly. Visibility was not good, so it was hard to see much detail. Funny because in the winter the visibility is supposed to be a lot better. Ah well. We circled around the stern of the ship and came across a large school of shiner perch. Their small silvery bodies gleamed very nicely in my light beam. There was a concrete slab on the bottom that used to have a marker buoy attached to it. It was packed with longhorn decorator crabs in the cracks around it. It also seemed that a lot of the marker buoys had been moved, and attached to newer, larger concrete road barriers. The work looked quite recent. Someone had been busy!

Resting under the port side of the wreck was a pretty large ling cod. He looked pretty happy sitting on the bottom watching us swim by. There was also one of the biggest kelp greenlings that I'd seen swimming around near there. We puttered around the artificial reefs looking for octopus next. We didn't find any, though. A bunch of divers must have come through, because we also came across a huge silt trail. They really kicked up the bottom. I don't recall anything else of unique interest until we were almost back to shore. Travelling along the bottom, the water got noticeably colder very quickly the shallower we got. It ended up around 5 or 6 degrees. I thought the sandy bottom would be pretty uninteresting, but was wrong. Mihai noticed a hairy crab which I'd not seen before. We also came across a huge gathering of dungeness crabs. They were kind of small, but there were over 30 of them all packed into a small area. There was a bigger red rock crab mixed in with them, too. I'd never seen so many crabs in one spot. There didn't look to be anything keeping them there (like food) but who knows. I wanted to investigate them more, but the dive was already going on long, and I was feeling the chill. Getting out into the cold air was a bit of a shock. I think the air temperature was around 4 degrees at that point.

We almost called it a day because of that. There weren't that many divers out, and by the time we were eating lunch, all of them had left already. We ended up sitting in the car for a while warming up, which helped, so the second dive was a go. However, we'd make it shorter, and planned to just explore the dock pilings that were very near rather than doing a long surface swim again.

The dock pilings turned out to be pretty interesting. The bottom was sandy, but had interesting lines carved in it by the wave action, and the pilings had a lot of life encrusting them. There were some rocks and such sunk there too which also provided a good home for life. I found an old baseball! I saw my first mossy chiton on one of the rocks, too. There were actually about 5 of them. Near one of the pilings, we practised some skills for the upcoming GUE Fundamentals course. The mask removal and clearing was a bit chilly on the face, but everything went well. I was happy that I wasn't floating up as much as I had in the past. Buoyancy was getting better! Mihai did well, but ended up dipping his fins too close to the bottom and stirred up a tonne of silt, and floating up a lot. We also later agreed that backfinning was something we really needed to learn. There's really no easy way to stay stationary in the water without being able to go forward and backwards. I also got a bit turned around under the dock, and ended up swimming too far south. But we fixed that and continued to explore, and called the dive after about half an hour. There was one of the biggest purple stars we'd ever seen. Coming back up to the surface was pretty cool. We came up the boat ramp, and it was neat to see the interface of the water and air getting closer and closer, with your bubbles disturbing it. It reminded me of the GUE training videos I'd seen, where they were practising in 5 feet of water.

We packed up as quickly as possible, and hopped in the car. By this time, I certainly was feeling the cold! It was a good set of dives. Today marked my 60th dive, which was great. More to come!


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