Telegraph Cove 05/05/2013

My first dive back in cold water since Mexico! Jim wanted to do practice for his upcoming Tech 2 course, so he, Greg and I went down to Victoria to do some bottle practice. Originally we thought to go to Willis Point, but visibility was pretty bad there, so we switched to Telegraph Cove. This was very close to the 10 Mile Point dive site.

We arrived early, so Jim and I grabbed a tea at the Star Bucks and took our time putting our gear together. Greg showed up, and we took our time, talking about Mexico and just enjoying the fairly nice day.

The dive plan for the first dive was to go out, find a depth around 20 or 30 feet, deploy a surface marker and tie it off, then run a line out and practice bottle rotation on that line. I was leading the dive, and we quickly found that Telegraph cove was shallow. Very shallow! The tide was on a large swing as well to low tide. So we spent at least 15 minutes swimming out and getting to about 15 feet maybe. There was not a lot to tie off to on the bottom either. In the end we tied the SMB to a small rock. Running the line to a point to tie off to was also frustrating. Blue gloves made my line skills not very good! I would need to practice a lot more with that. Bare hands in Mexico was quite different!

Once we got set up, we started to practice. The SMB creeped along the line too, so there was some creative tie-down action using a spare double ender to get it fixed better. Jim and Greg did bottle rotations for most of the dive. I did a few gas switches and valve and gas-sharing drills too. We spent almost an hour doing all of this, then it started to get a bit too cold. Getting back to the beach was a bit of a challenge too. The bottom was so shallow it made natural navigation using the depth change non-existent.

After a nice surface interval answering local walker’s questions, we went back out again to see if we could find anything interesting other than sand. On the first dive, that’s all we really found. We tried going to the right, and did eventually find some rocks with nudibranchs and some life. But it was a lot of sand still, and very shallow. Since it took so long to swim to anything interesting, Telegraph Cove seemed not such a great dive site. I do remember finding a huge number of gumboot chitons however. I picked up several and we examined them. I also dropped a sea cucumber in front of Jim from above, which scared him. There were quite a few shenanigans on this dive. Greg stole my stage bottle at one point, but I noticed pretty quickly. We had to do something to make the dive interesting!

In the end, it was nice to check out Telegraph. However, it was only very good for training, and maybe not even that. Certainly you would not want to dive there at low tide!