Saturday, July 3, 2010

Victoria - 03/07/2010

For the Canada Day weekend I planned a dive trip to Victoria. The tides and currents looked good to do 10 Mile Point. I really liked this drift dive when I did it before and wanted to try it again.

It was an early start to get to the site to hit slack tide. I was diving with Ivan Delacruz. Despite the early morning, and some missed turns, we made it without incident.

At the site, we looked things over and finalized our dive plan. It looked like the current was stronger than what the tables indicated.

Once in the water below the parking lot, we descended and were immediately swept towards the point. We didn't get a chance to get onto the wall at all. For the rest of the dive we were pretty shallow,10 to 20 feet, and close to shore. We followed the shore with the current through a lot of kelp forests. The visibility was maybe 20 feet. The kelp was full of decorator crabs and schools of shiner perch. I didn't want to go out deeper for fear of going too far out into the channel and missing the exit.

As it stood, we exited pretty far down the shore at the bay near the first turn off to the dive site. Getting out onto the rocks was a bit tricky with doubles, and the walk back to the car was tiring.

The dive wasn't all I had hoped, but it came down to missing slack tide. Using the Race Rocks current table worked, but we had to add 15 minutes to half an hour I think. Still I enjoyed the shallow drift dive immensely because of the exploration of the kelp forests.

There was no point doing a second dive at 10 Mile, so I decided to take us to Willis Point, which had been a great dive for me previously.

Arriving showed that there was no one diving Willis that day. One diver was just leaving, giving us a good visibility report and that he had seen a wolf eel on the left side about 140 feet. We'd not be going that deep though.

Willis Point turned out to be the gem of the day. 50 foot visibility at least, a great wall, no current and lots to see. Murky down to 30 feet, but stellar under that. The sun was out so it was quite bright.

Of particular note were the hordes of moon jellies. There were also a few lions mane jellyfish mixed in. It was that time of season!

Large swimming nudibranchs abounded, along with a spectacular opalescent nudibranch. Black rockfish were to be seen too.

The highlight was a baby giant pacific octopus crawling around in the open. It was about the size of a cereal bowl.

Two awesome dives at Willis!

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