Furry Creek 13/02/2011

Jason had not been out to Furry Creek before, so we decided to go do some more exploring. I had not found the wall that was there so I wanted to do that at the very least. It was a fun dive the last time, too.

The day was awesome. The day before was terrible. Poor Jason was out doing an open water class that day and it was rainy cold and windy. Generally unpleasant! But not today. It was sunny and relatively warm.

When we arrived there were already some divers in the water. I was quite surprised! I didn't expect anyone dove this site with any regularity. But it was a pretty nice day. We asked the other group breifly where the wall was, and got some better directions. They were not sticking around for a second dive.

We got geared up again down the walkway on the wooden bench. A few dog-walkers went by while we were there, and we got several questions about what we were doing.

Again,t he logs on the beach were problematic. Not so bad with single cylinders, but doubles would be a bit difficult. There was a fair amount of clambering and stepping involved. That was the only downside to this site.

We entered the water off the small beach area to the north east. Jason wiped out on some of the slippery rocks and tore his marigold glove. He had a cold, wet hand for the whole dive unfortunately.

We swam out on the surface to the white marker buoy, which was almost straight north. We did not go for the red buoy, as that was in the wrong location. We descended on the line of the white buoy and headed north. It was quite shallow where we started, about 30 feet. The bottom was pretty sandy and devoid of features. We came across some rocky boulders and kept heading north. The plan was to hit 80 feet and find the wall. The bottom sloped gradually down, but once we were past the boulders there were no features and it didn't look like anything would appear to the north. So we swung north east and before long ran right into the wall.

In hindsight, a better way to find the wall at Furry Creek was this. Enter the water off the beach closest to the cul-de-sac and just follow the shoreline contour along the north east. This will start off pretty shallow, but will put you right onto the wall with no problems.

We didn't come across anything too spectacular, but there were a lot of small cloud sponges near 80 feet. A lot more than seemed normal. There were a lot of nice large anemones too, not just the regular plumose ones. Not many interesting fish, just the regular greenlings and ling cods. The rock wall was interesting in itself, with a nice formation. In the shallows there was a large rock overhang. Too small to get under, but you could see through it.

After some food and a surface interval, and some warming up, we were back in for the second dive. The water was noticeably colder, at 6 degrees. We both were feeling it!

The second dive was to see if there was anything worth seeing to the north west. We swam out along the bottom this time to the north and curved back in south. This proved to be relatively uninteresting. We came across the boulder ridge that runs east-west along the 40 foot contour or so, but that petered out very soon after following it west and south. We found the large concrete block that the red float tied to, but everything around that was sand and shallow. So we turned around and poked around along the boulder ridge for a bit and headed back in.

There was a lot of octopus evidence, but we didn't find any. Also none of the boulders concealed anything exciting. A lot of coonstripe shrimp peered out at us, but that was about it.

Visiblity was quite good, so the swim back in was quite nice.

Apart from the cold water, it was a very good day of diving!