Friday, October 15, 2010

Howe Sound Boat Dive - 10/10/2010

It was time for a boat dive, so I went out with Mihai on the Topline. It was fall, so the boat had moved to the other side of the marina. Good thing I remembered they did that, otherwise we would have been looking for a long time!

The day was very nice. It started out threatening but cleared up nicely.

The first dive was on North Bowyer. I had brought my AL80 stage for some practice so this was ideal. Mihai and I planned a dive of 50 minutes with an average of 70 feet. We ended up shallower so extended it to almost an hour. The stage practice went well, but the visibility was very poor. Maybe 10 or 15 feet. Not much exciting in terms of things to see either, so not the best of dives. We had some team positioning and communication problems, but I think that was due to Mihai being out of the water for a while and also had a leak and computer problems.

The second dive site was new to me. It was the North East wall on Bowyer island. Kevin had reported a lot of octopus there the previous week, so I was hoping to see a bunch. This dive site was a not bad wall, but it wasn't as nice as the Cut at Whitecliff. There we're some cloud sponges and other life such as you would find on a wall, but not a lot of it. Certainly not as much as you'd find other places. The wall too was plateaued, so there was not a drop off to nothing. This made it a lot easier for newer divers. We had a few along, so that was good.

We practised SMB deployment at the end of the dive, and that went pretty well.
All in all, not a bad day, but visibility was very poor. Too bad, since it was so sunny and nice. No octopus either! Oh well, next time.

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