I ended up diving two sites this weekend. Originally I had thought to do a crab dive on Saturday, but decided to put that off for another day.
Saturday found me teamed up with David Ryan, whom had invited me out that day. We planned to dive the Cut at Whytecliff Park, but Allan Wong texted us and advised that the visibility at Whytecliff was very poor. So we decided to dive Kelvin Grove instead.
It was quite a rainy Saturday which was unfortunate. We got to Kelvin Grove about noon, and there was another group of divers there packing up. We asked them how things were and they said it was not good. They didn't look happy! Still, they may have been too shallow, and we banked on the visibility being better deeper. I had my double cylinders set up and ready, but couldn't use them yet. I was waiting to schedule a check-out dive with Alan Johnson, but his drysuit was out for repair. That left me diving my single steel 100s. Not ideal from a gas-matching point of view, since David was on double 130s. My air consumption was a lot better now, so we planned the dive accordingly. I'd be the limiting factor, and I estimated that I could get a 40 minute dive averaging around 60 or 70 feet. Our plan was to do 20 minutes at 80 feet, then 20 minutes at 60 or so, turning at half my gas.
Hitting the water, things didn't look good. It was very very murky, with a lot of particulate matter in the water. We descended following the sandy bottom and could hardly see each other two feet away. I was leading, and we headed out to the right-hand rock wall. It took a bit of time to find it, or it could have just been an illusion since you couldn't seen anything. Once we descended past 50 feet, things cleared up thankfully.
I forgot how nice the wall at Kelvin was. There were a huge number of boot/chimney sponges, and most of them were very big. At least the size of a big dog. Many had something living inside, usually a fish or a crab. We came across a pretty big puget sound king crab, too. We checked all the cracks and crevices we could, but nothing of note was home. There was a particularly large ling cod that swam off into the gloom beneath us. It was 4 or 5 feet long.
Both dives were very dark due to the cloudy skies and layers of soupy water. Really they were much like night dives. There was little to no current which was pretty nice. We didn't have to expend much effort at all. I worked on my frog and back kicks, and felt good about them.
The next day Mihai and I dove Copper Cove. I had been meaning to explore it a bit, since the other two times I'd been there, I had just been helping Jason do his underwater map.
The day was a big change from Saturday: clear, sunny and warm. Too bad the visibility ended up being even worse! The tidal exchange that day was very large, and we were diving on the low tide side. Our first plan was to find the rocky reefs in the middle of the bay. We descended on the left hand point, and went north to 70 feet. Then we turned east and followed that depth to hopefully find the reefs. The problem was that the water was so murky. It took a long time to swim out down to 70 feet, as the sandy bottom was very shallow for a long ways. We spent a lot of time in soup, which wasn't so fun. After getting deeper, it did clear up, but the trip along the 70 foot contour was very dull. More sand and nothing to see. We did spot a big tanner crab on the way, but that was it. Finally we ran into the reef. It was kind of worrying, since it was so dark you could not see very far ahead. I was about to turn us around when we finally came across some rocks. The reef we found was fairly interesting, as well as big. There were a number of ledges and big boulders and crevices. We spent the rest of the dive exploring all that we could, since I figured we'd not find anything else interesting if we left. Mihai found a decorated warbonnet under a large boulder which was a cool find. There was also a boulder fully covered with zoanthids. It was like something out of Doctor Seuss. Large plumose anemones decorated everything. No octopus for us, though. There had been several folks who had told me that this reef could have lots of them. We swam back to shore following the bottom south. Again, it was a huge long stretch of sandy nothing. We did come across a prawn trap, which was the most exciting thing on the way, really. There were also a surprising amount of bottles everywhere. If you liked bottle collecting, you'd find a lot.
The saving grace to the sub-optimal dives was the nice day. It was like summer!
On the second dive, we had planned to check out the rocks to the east side of the bay. This fell through, though. We swam out a ways, then descended and were supposed to follow the bottom east until we hit the rocks. That didn't happen and we ended up on the same rock reef that we were on before. In hind-sight, we should have went out to the point on the left, descended and followed those rocks down to the wall that was supposed to be there. Too bad! I would have to remember that wall, since it would have been a lot more interesting than doing the same rock reef. Again, we had a long swim back to shore over sandy nothing. During the dive, the current made it like a little drift dive over the reef. That was kind of nice.
In the end, Copper Cove just wasn't that interesting!
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