Caulfield Cove 09/10/2010

It was always fun to check out a new dive site, and Jason and I did just that. I had known about Caulfield Cove for a long time, but had never taken the opportunity to check it out. Caulfield Cove was pretty easy to get to, being even closer to town than Whitecliff. However, parking was very limited and as we would find out, quite shallow and barren.

Betty Pratt in the 151 Dives book called Caulfield a great place to find bottles. When that description has been used, the dive usually is less than stellar. Usually shallow and lots of mud. Bottles yes but you really have to like that!

I'm getting ahead of myself.

It looked like the area could be promising with rock cliffs lining the west shore, and a rocky outcropping to a bay to the east. There was a DFO dock here, and some people would use that to dive from. Jason and I decided to park in the parking spot by the garbage can and enter the water from the beach trail that was near that. We checked out the rocky outcropping but that looked too steep and craggy.

We knew the site would be shallow, so planned accordingly. On the first dive we decided to cross the bay to the rock cliffs on the west and follow those out south. Crossing the bay was pretty uninteresting. We did find a lot of bottles and golf balls. We did find a cracked white china plate with a blue pattern on it. Treasure from long ago, or knock-off modern crap. Not sure! There were rumours of all sorts of things lost overboard here, as it was a shipping stop-point.

All in all, It was a uniform muddy bottom with little life. Some red rock and dungeness crabs, and a few midshipmen. We did find a brand new boat anchor and chain in the middle of the bay. I marked it with my SMB just to see if we could recover it later.

Finally we made it to the west side, and discovered the bottom sand/mud sloped up all the way to meet the rock, meaning there was really not much there at all. No wall anyway. We followed this for some time at 10 feet and came across a lot of red algae and eel grass. There was a frosted nudibranch which was the highlight of the wildlife. We crossed back over the bay and found a few rock outcroppings on the way back to the dock, that seemed good for the second dive.

We returned to the anchor but it was too heavy to safely raise. We'd need lift bags to do it properly, and so we abandoned it.

Our average depth was something like 10 feet. We did both dives on a single steel 100. Jason mentioned his air consumption had gotten better, too. A pretty good day!