Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Britannia Beach GUE-BC 25/01/2017

I hadn't been out to Britannia Beach in a long time, and so I took the opportunity after Diver's Weekend to go for a dive there with Vlad. He also wanted to deploy one of the temperature sensors that he had made, and take new GPS readings on the stations.

Since it would be a night dive, and the tide was falling, we decided to enter via the path beside the billboard rather than from the Galileo Coffee Company. It turned out to be a good decision.

Once we got in the water, the visibility was excellent. On the way to the wrecks we did find Station B first, and the line that linked it to the CCGS Ready. The orange line that we had run last year was brown and very hard to see. On the way we came across a very cool brown box crab.


We followed the line to the Ready and inspected the ship on the way to the stern where Station A was. It looked in good shape, and there were huge schools of perch around it. At the stern, I made a bit of a boo-boo and carried on looking for the station when it was right there! Vlad got me sorted out and we didn't waste too much time. Note to self: Station A is right on the stern, on the port side beside the ship.

Station A visibility was measured at 7.2 meters. Vlad attached his temperature sensor and took a GPS reading and we were off to Station B!


On the way, I saw the biggest squat lobsters that I had ever seen.


And a very cool tubesnout posing on the decking.


Station B had a visibility reading of 6.4 meters. The current was really starting to pick up, and I had a big challenge back-finning while spooling out the tape measure. Not sure what this hermit crab was doing, but it had another one in its claws so it was probably mating in some way!


Finally, I got some very good video too. After we got out of the water, we were treated to a train show.