Yay another boat dive with the Sea Dragon crew! Jason was supposed to come on this, but work prevented him. Instead, my planned dive buddy was Vince, and I also ended up diving with Adrian whom I had met in November in Port Hardy.
I hitched a ride with Vince that morning. It was a bit foggy on the drive to Horseshoe Bay, but I figured it was just low-lying cloud. It was overcast again, but not raining so that was good. There were no marine warnings, either.
There was a new crew member on board, Kyle, filling in for Jan who was off to Montreal. Kyle was an avid diver, too. We got underway a bit late but not bad. The ocean was smooth as glass. It was quite strange. Kevin the skipper said he'd never seen it so calm before.
We had some warm-water divers with us, so the first dive was an easy one at the Canyons, just south of Bowyer island. Vince and Adrian and myself formed a trio on this dive. I was hoping that we'd find the wolf-eel lair and that they'd be home. Unfortunately, they weren't. I'm not even really sure that I found their lair! I think I did, but the rock looked different. There was quite a bit of current too for such calm water on the surface. Our dive took us north for about 10 minutes, then we did a u-turn and came back south to the mooring line. On the way out and the way back I'm pretty sure I checked the right place for the wolf-eels. There were two pretty nice and big crimson anemones. We took a small wrong turn on the way back and ended up going too much to the east. I realized we were over the start of the wall that runs that way and turned us back, so we made it back to the mooring line with no real problems. There was a giant rock scallop right at the base of the line which was pretty cool. It was about 6 to 8 inches across. All in all, it was not a bad dive, and around 30 minutes. The visibility was ok, but not great, maybe 30 feet. Unfortunately, it was just uneventful. I liken it to a walk around your block. Sure it's nice, but it was nothing special.
Teri and Dave were on the boat too, and were diving double 130s. They were down a lot longer, of course, and ended up exploring the wall that we turned back from. I think they had a pretty good dive. The other group of warm-water divers had a few issues, but were generally ok. Vince practiced some of his dive-master-in-training skills, as he stayed behind when Adrian and I ascended and helped them out.
During our surface interval, and our trip to the next dive site, I learned from Kevin that they had a new boat coming. Apparently the new boat could hold 20 divers! I was excited to see what it would be like.
The next dive site was a new one for me, which was great. I had heard about Hutt Island, and Hutt Wall before. The island was just north of Bowen Island. On the north tip of Hutt Island was Hutt Wall. It turned out to be a really great wall dive, dropping down to around 80 feet of white sandy bottom. The wall itself was long and covered in life.
Stuff that I'm pretty sure I saw were a tubular vase sponge and a cloud sponge as well as a boot/chimney sponge . I checked inside the chimney sponges for critters, but only turned up a gobi or two. Underneath one of them though was a painted greenling. I had only seen painted greenlings before in Tuwanek, but apparently there were lots of them in Howe Sound too. I tried to get fancy and turned over on my back to get a better look at him. That ended up to be a mistake, as I had a very ungraceful recovery back to horizontal. Whoops.
There were the ever-present giant plumose anemones covering a lot of the wall, along with a pink scallop or two. A white nudibranch stood out on the rocks near the end of the dive. In the crevices were lots and lots of coonstripe shrimps. They looked a lot redder than the ones I'd seen before, so I had mistaken them for another type of shrimp. But apparently coonstripe shrimps can get very red according to my marine life book. The highlight of the dive had to be all the rhinoceros crabs. They were everywhere. There was also a hairy crab and a really big longhorn decorator crab. In another crevice I'm sure there was a butterfly crab, and swimming off of the wall were large schools of striped seaperch and maybe a puget sound rockfish or two. I noticed a poor spiral shell snail or hermit crab in a spiral shell bouncing down the wall at one point. I guess he got dislodged from above!
Hutt Wall had become one of my favorite dive sites after all of that. I had a bit of a leak around my drysuit neck seal so I was a bit colder and damper today which was a downside, but generally it was a great day for diving. I had also adjusted the webbing on my rig with the help of Alan and that made things better terms of my horizontal trim. So that was good too! Teri had invited me along to a dive she was planning in Dodd Narrows in April. It would be just after I got back from Port Hardy. Can't get enough diving I guess!
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