Friday, April 30, 2010

Porteau Cove – 24/04/2010

Not the nicest day for a dive due to rain and wind, but I was itching to try out my new 400 weight thinsulate undergarment. It had been quite a saga to get the thing. I ordered the original back in October. However due to slow shipping, size problems and finally having it lost in the mail I gave up on that one after over 5 months of waiting and bought a DUI XM450. They just came out with tall sizing, and I fit it quite well.

Mihai and I decided on Porteau for the ease of the dive. The plan was also to do some skills, and I wanted to check my weighting with the new undergarment. We swam out to the yellow marker buoy on the right, which would put us near the artificial reef. We then planned to swim west to the Grant Hall wreck, then circle around the sailboat. We'd be not even getting to 60 feet for the duration of the dive, so we had plenty of no decompression time. We figured it would be a 45-50 minute dive. At the end, we'd swim in to shore and do skills at about 25 feet.

Visibility wasn't great but it wasn't horrible either; maybe 20 feet. We poked around on the artificial reef first, and I'm glad we did for we found an octopus in one of the crevices at 36 feet. One of its arms was waving out of the hole in the water which was pretty neat. It wasn't doing much, so we watched it for a few minutes then continued on. There were two huge ling cod, too. One was on the deck of the Grant Hall and it swam off leisurely into the darkness of one of the deck hatches.

While following the Grant Hall's hull down the starboard side, something weird happened near the stern at 45 feet. The was a distinct layer of very brown water from that point on down where the visibility was only a few feet. Above it, it was better. So we stayed out of that and went up to deck level and around that way. The remainder of the dive had nothing much of note other than a few decorator crabs. We headed along the bottom back towards shore, and stopped at 25 feet to do an S-drill then an SMB deployment and ascent drill. All of that went alright. There were rough edges that needed polishing but we did keep our position. The ascent drill was a bit slow too, but overall I was pleased.

The second dive was shorter, since I wanted to get back to the Shop to pick up cylinders for the next day. We entered at the boat ramp and explored around under the dock pilings. Again, not a tremendous amount of things that jumped out at me. There was a school of shiner perch that was neat. Also an old crab trap surrounded by hundreds of brittle stars. There were a bunch of dungeness crabs running around, too. The bottom under the dock was pretty sand and mostly featureless apart from the life that congregated around the pilings. We ended the dive after about 40 minutes, and an average depth of about 30 feet. We followed the rocks along shore back around to the boat ramp and that was interesting. When we got close to the exit, a distinct halocline happened. A layer of fresh water over top of the salt. Putting your head up through it resulted in a wavy surreal view.

The next time I go out to Porteau, I have to remember to find the firehose. If you swim to the first white marker buoy and descend there, not far to the west is a firehose that marks a path all the way to the sailboat. Apparently it's a very nice way to avoid a long surface swim!

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