Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Porteau Cove 09/01/2010

Vince asked me to help fulfil some of his dive master requirements, namely a discover local diving dive and a lead a certified diver dive. He had Landon lined up to do the evaluation, so I figured it would be a fun excuse to go out diving. We got up very early, though, so it wasn't a day for sleeping in!

It was a pretty miserable day, with rain and cloud. However, the temperature was over 10 degrees, so it was pretty warm. We stopped by Tim Hortons on the way out, and I rode with Landon in his new car. Vince's truck was full of dive gear. It was a good drive. I'd not spent much time getting to know Landon, so it was nice to chat about diving with someone new.

There was one diver out at Porteau Cove when we arrived at around 8. Landon knew him, but I can't recall his name. He was solo diving on doubles, and was just going out into the water when we arrived. Vince did his site briefing, and went over our dive plan, and he did pretty well. It didn't take long to gear up, and we started swimming out to the marker buoys. The first dive would be around the Grant Hall wreck, then out to the sailboat wreck and around the pipe reef, then ascending at the Grant Hall. At least, I think that was the plan! Landon had talked to me before hand to make sure that if Vince got too far ahead that I would stop and see how far he'd get before noticing, and pull an out of gas scenario if he didn't check gas pressures. It wasn't being mean, it was providing valuable experience! Actually, there never was an opportunity to do these, as Vince did pretty well keeping track of things.

I'm going to collapse both dives into one description, because I took too long to write this up, and have forgotten a lot of the details. Landon had a problem with his UK light, but got it sorted out. This was the second time I'd seen a problem with the UK lights not turning on (Mihai had a problem previously). On the dives, we saw a tonne of the coonstripe shrimps. They were everywhere. Landon found a tire with about 5 hairy crabs. Or at least, I thought they were hairy crabs. There was also the biggest longhorn decorator crab I'd seen on the deck of the Grant Hall (maybe a foot from arm to arm). I spent a lot of time looking in the crevices of the deck plates, and there were tonnes of things living in there, along with a small decorated warbonnet. We also were able to find an octopus sleeping in a crevice in the pipe reef. He was pretty hard to see though. Visibility was good on both the dives, so that was nice. At one point, Vince stopped and turned around and his canister light fell off his harness. That was pretty amusing, seeing the 'dive master' hovering there with a dangling light. That was sorted out, though. Landon had some good pointers on my frog kicks which helped a lot. I could feel my fins biting the water a lot more. Hopefully that would help reduce my gas consumption rates, since I wouldn't be working as hard to move. We'll see!

The second dive was a marathon dive of over 50 minutes. That was really fun. On the way back, we paralleled the rocks lining the shore, and it was really great seeing the surface above and the bottom below. It felt like being in the GUE underwater training videos I'd been watching. The sun had sort of come out, so the sky was quite bright through the water. It looked like a distorted mirror effect. There were also a lot of dungeness crabs again in the shallow waters. I don't know why there have been so many, but there they were again. A lot of them were quite big too, but being a marine protected area meant no crabbing!

All in all, a successful day of diving.

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