After a great weekend diving out of Port Hardy, it was another packed weekend of diving again. Terri Norfolk invited me along on this trip back around March, and I had heard a lot about Diver's Choice and Dodd Narrows. I couldn't wait to experience it first hand.
I've got a few above-water pictures of the trip here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/AntonNorth/ScubaDoddNarrowsApril2010#
There were a lot of travel logistics involved. We had 5 divers coming across from Vancouver, and the plan was to stay over night in Nanimo to do some shore diving on Sunday. Terri Norfolk, David Ryan, Allan Wong, Cedric Galere and me rounded out that crew. Allan was doing a tech dive with his buddies Greg and Richard, along with recreational dives after. On Saturday, we would be out with Ken from Diver's Choice, and Sunday would be just from shore. We had toyed with the idea of doing the wrecks near Nanaimo with Ken, but ultimately the poor visibility killed that idea.
Most of the logistics involved vehicles and splitting people and equipment up most logically. We ended up taking two cars, with Allan picking me and Cedric up, and Terri and Dave taking their own car. It was an early start on Saturday! The weather was awesome though, clear and sunny. We made the 8 o'clock ferry fine, and got over to Nanaimo in good order.
We basically hopped right onto the Diver's Choice boat when we got there. Ken met us with his newly built skiff which made getting gear from the parking lot to the boat easier. The skiff was a bit light and moved a lot, so you had to watch yourself especially when carrying heavy gear. Aaron was the fellow helping out Ken on the boat, and he was a good resource to help with stuff.
We met Richard and Greg, the two tech divers who would dive with Allan. Richard had participated in the recent SREU project in Indian Arm. We did a group picture, but Greg wasn't in it because he was changing at the time.
The first dive site was Gabriola Bluffs. Allan, Richard and Greg splashed first as they were on a longer tech dive with a decompression obligation planned. The bluff was a long, shear rock wall stretching up a good 200 feet or so. We did a live boat entry and descended. Cedric and I were diving together, and Terri and David made up the other team. Our original plan was to stay together, but that soon fell apart as we found out just how poor the visibility was that day. I'm sure it was no more than 10 or 15 feet at best, and it was very dark. Too bad! The dive plan was to spend 20 minutes at 90 feet, 20 at 70 feet, and 20 at 50 feet then do our controlled ascent to the surface. That all worked out pretty well, but the two dive teams got separated fairly quickly.
It's too bad the visibility was so bad on this dive, as I could really see the potential for this wall dive. There was a particularly huge rock overhang that would have been awesome to see in its entirety. I remember swimming along and noticed how dark it got all of a sudden. Looking up with my light illuminated the huge overhang in the gloom. The topography of the wall would have been great to see in larger detail, but oh well. In terms of life, it was pretty standard. A lot of giant white plumose anemones. There was one section of overhang that had a lot of them growing straight downward, and they had elongated to ridiculous lengths.
At the end of the dive, Cedric and I were quite far from the boat so I inflated my giant surface marker buoy for fun. David's mask broke on him after this dive which was a bad problem. It was a prescription mask, so any backup masks would mean fuzzy dives for him for the rest of the trip. He fixed it temporarily, but then it broke again on Sunday! We relaxed in the sun on the boat deck, had a nice lunch and then prepared for Dodd Narrows.
The Narrows could only be done safely on a slack tide, and even then there could be problems with boat traffic, especially log booms. Fortunately none of that happened today. The current in Dodd Narrows was what made it so special. It meant that it could be a very fast drift dive, and the amount of life in the channel was incredible. It was only about 200 feet wide, and 100 feet deep. There were several stories about people getting caught in upwellings and downwellings, in eddies on the surface and things like that. The general rule was to keep your regulator in your mouth until you got back on the boat. Cedric and I missed the Narrows unfortunately as we went the opposite direction. We missed part of the dive briefing and just assumed the current direction would be easily noticeable. We still had a nice dive, but ended up on the opposite side of the Narrows. Good thing I had my giant 6 foot surface marker buoy. You could see that big thing from miles away. I also found a working UK100 underwater light. Quite the treasure find. There were a lot of rock formations to swim around, and also a lot to look at. There were a few interesting nudibranchs and green anemones, but nothing big that jumps out in my mind. The other groups had a good dive too. The visibility was quite a bit better, but not stellar.
We got back into the harbour and unloaded everything. The plan was to stay at Ken's place, as he was set up to allow a lot of divers to stay. His house was big and comfy. There was room to sleep at least 10 or more. We met his little dog Niko, and his two goats. The goats were a bit of a surprise! That evening we unwound at the Longwood Pub. A good place with good beer and reasonable prices. We discussed the next day's plan, too.
We got up and left Ken's place at 8am and went for breakfast at the Granary. A pretty good home-style breakfast place. Our plan was to dive Tyee Beach at about 10, and we were meeting some other divers there, too. We found the place fairly easily and met Scott. He was a professional underwater photographer, and gave a pretty detailed description of Tyee Beach as a dive site. His website was http://www.8arm.com/.
The best place to dive on Tyee was to the right after you entered the water. Going to the left was shallow, full of eel grass and relatively dull according to Scott. To the right was a lot of rocks and a pretty long wall around 70 feet deep. There did seem to be sections deeper, too. The rock formations were like a layer cake, but with layers missing. This left hard rock plates separated by nothing, which made lots of crevices. The visibility wasn't the best, but it was better than at Gabriola Bluffs. We had maybe 20 feet of visibility I'd say.
On the first dive, Cedric and I teamed up again. We saw a few interesting nudibranchs and a lot of baby copper rockfish. Even though we looked in every crack we could, we didn't find much other than gobbies staring back with their black eyes. There was one neat hairy crab, though. We found you didn't want to keep going past where the wall ran out, as it turned into an uninteresting sandy slope.
There was another dive site very close by at Porpoise Beach, but we decided to stay where we were. The second dive was much like the first, but we spent more time on the wall itself, and shallower. There was a huge boot sponge all alone on one part of the wall. Coming up in the shallows there was a lot of waving kelp and algae. The light was pretty good, so it gave it a very bright and tropical look. Not tropical temperature-wise though. Terri sat this dive out due to being chilly. Cedric mentioned the same quite often too. I didn't feel too bad myself, but my hands were cold at the end of each dive I must admit.
Allan and David shot a bit of video on the dives, but with the visibility not great, most of it didn't turn out. I wasn't sure how many good pictures Scott got, I'd have to ask him later. He seemed pretty enthusiastic about getting out diving all over the place, trying to make a living taking pictures. I would think it was pretty tough to do that! He had a lot of good stories about some of his picture escapades. He'd even got pictures of the rare six-gill sharks in the BC waters.
If you have facebook access, Allan had two videos here:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/video/video.php?v=381272143045
http://www.facebook.com/#!/video/video.php?v=381188593045
Depending on his security settings, I'm not sure if you'll be able to view them or not. Don't bother trying to find me in the videos. Even though I'm tagged as being in them, I'm not!
We got back for the ferry, and had a few drinks out in the sun at the pub near the ferry terminal to kill some time. Out of the wind, it was an awesome warm day.
I have to get back diving around Nanaimo and try out Madrona Point, and do Dodd Narrows for real, too. Scott talked a lot about the dive sites around Victoria, which were supposed to be even better. Another place to check out soon!
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