Monday, December 13, 2010

Cottam Point and Wall Beach, Nanaimo 04/12/2010

After diving at Tuwanek, Anita had invited me to dive the wrecks at Nanaimo with her friend Bill. I found later that I had met Bill on the Diver's Choice boat. Bill had a pretty nice dive boat too. However we weren't able to use it in the end, and I didn't get to see it.

Getting anywhere early with a ferry involved meant getting up even earlier. I had to get up at 4:30. With an office Christmas party the night before, it was extremely difficult.

We made the 6 am ferry with no problems. But soon found out from Bill that his boat had a problem, and he needed to fix it. Some folks were counting on using it for some dive training the next day, so he had to get it done and couldn't do any diving.

We went for coffee and had a good time discussing rebreathers. Bill had gotten on to them because of a bad back (they were lighter) and had spent a good deal of time learning their pros and cons. I had never really talked in depth with a rebreather diver, so it was interesting to get one take on them.

We also talked about possible dive sites. We decided on Cottam Point and Wall Beach. Both sites can be seen on this map.

http://goo.gl/maps/MKxu

Cottam Point is at the top of the map, and Wall Beach is near the bottom.

We went to Cottam Point first. We had done a lot of reading on the highlights of the site based off of a photographer/blogger. It was also listed in the 151 Dives book. Based on the bottom contours we thought we'd find some kind of wall.

The entry to the site was down a fairly steep set of very rough “stairs”. They were basically rocks, not stairs. Getting doubles down to the rock beach was a bit tricky but doable. There were quite a few rocks to put them on and gear up. You could also drive your car down the lane and gear up there, but parking wasn't allowed there. We opted to bring everything down to the beach.

The entry into the water was on a wide expanse of fairly flat rock. At low tide, it would be very slippery due to the abundance of seaweed. It was also hard to see where to step with all the seaweed and there were a lot of sharp rocks. I put a hole in my drysuit boot. Not a big one, but it certainly started to leak. I needed to send in my suit to get a new neck seal, so it could be fixed at the same time.

Our dive plan was to swim north west towards Mystery Island, then curve out and head south east. The depth contours seemed like there should be a wall there. In the end this was a very shallow dive, about 30 feet max. We hit some current, and could not do the dive as planned. Also the bottom was quite flat and fairly featureless heading to the north west. I think the problem was that the depth contours and map in the 151 dive book was just a larger area than what can be conceivably done on a dive without a scooter. We noticed some sea lions in the water, but none came to visit. There was one nice octopus in a crack, and a huge number of nice nudibranchs. The opalescent, feathered and leopard to name some. There were no large bull kelp forests, but some. The smaller bottom kelp and algae were quite nice to see waving in the water. The visibility was awesome, and with it being so shallow, it seemed almost tropical. There was a lot of light streaming down too.

Recommendations for Cottham point would be to enter farther to the west shore, and south, then come around the point to the east. Or vice versa depending on the current. It was a very shallow dive.

We left Cottham to go try Wall Beach. We had a small map from Bill, and he recommended it because there were a lot of wolf eels. Unfortunately we misread the map and dove the wrong spot. You had to keep going along Seahaven Road to the end. We entered at the end of Wall Beach road. There is a beach there, and it took 25 minutes of surface swimming to get out to a depth beyond 20 feet. It's too bad we missed the dive site! Still, it was interesting. There were a tonne of oysters on the bottom of the bay. I'd never seen so many. Also, a flock of about 20 diving birds (I think they were a kind of murre) dove down from the surface to the bottom right in front of us. It was like a scene from the Planet Earth series. Once the main flock swam back to the surface trailing a stream of bubbles from their feathers, a straggler zoomed up after them as if to say “wait for me!”.

So, we would have to go back and check out the right dive site next time! Here is the map that we had:

http://nanaimodiveoutfitters.ca/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=739

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