Monday, February 8, 2010

Whytecliff Park 07/02/2010

Jason hadn't been able to do much diving due to work, so he wanted to do an easy set of dives this weekend to get back into the swing of things. My other buddy Mihai had been laid up with a sore shoulder. Jason and I planned to go to Whytecliff and mess around there. I needed to get as much diving in as possible before the start of my GUE Fundamentals course!

The IDC shop was running an Open Water course, so Landon and Alan were there that day. We chatted a bit with them throughout the morning, but they were busy with students.

It was a fairly nice day. Cloudy but not raining and fairly warm. We decided to explore the rock reef to the eastern side of the bay. I had been there before, but it was a long time ago so I was curious to see what I'd remember. Finding the reef was pretty easy so that was no problem at all. The reef seemed pretty small at first, but was actually quite large. A large portion of it was shallow though, around 10 meters. The deepest portion was around 18 meters, and bottomed out to sand. Touring around the reef we found tube-dwelling anemones , brown oval cup corals, an orange sea pen, and lots of yellow-rimmed nudibranchs. I was surprised to see a bright orange cooper's dorid or sea lemon. It had small red spots and was quite brilliant. I'd not seen one of those kind of nudibranchs before. Clinging to a rock was a swimming scallop which took off swimming when I waved some water at it. I also recovered a golf ball from the bottom which became my treasure for the day (I found a second one later on the next dive too). The distortion of the water really made it look huge. We followed the bottom back towards shore, and not far north of the reef on the sandy bottom we came across a long tree trunk. It was around 10 meters deep. By chance, I decided to investigate the end of it, and found that it was hollow. In that hollow was a pacific red octopus! He was very easy to see curled up in the log and it was a super good find. I spent a bit of time admiring a particularly large sunflower star (much bigger and more arms than the one in this picture) moving very fast along the bottom. It was very interesting to watch it move with its thousands of tube feet. There were also a lot of pacific sea peachs and bristly tunicates. It took me a while to identify the tunicates in my marine life book, since I thought that they were sponges at first. Finally, all over the rocks were lots of graceful decorator crabs and red rock crabs. The decorator crabs were a lot redder than those in the picture. There was also eel grass nearer shore, and some kind of tube worm protruding from the sand. I couldn't for the life of me find it in my marine life book.

After some lunch, we followed the west side of the bay out to the Day marker and the plumose anemone gardens. Along the way I found a giant pacific chiton which I had never seen in Whytecliff before. There were also some slime stars and a big buffalo sculpin. I thought that the buffalo sculpin was a cabezon at the time, but later I realized it just wasn't big enough, and didn't quite look right.

After we got back into the bay, I got some practice deploying my surface marker buoy. It didn't go that well! My lips were too cold to properly inflate it, and I had problems getting it out of my pocket. Instead of ascending straight up to it, we also drifted quite a ways away so it kind of defeated the purpose of marking where we were ascending. Oh well, more practice I guess! Alan laughed at us on the surface.

Finding the octopus in the log and all the cool nudibranchs were the highlights of this dive. It showed that you can see great things even in “boring” places like Whytecliff!

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