Vladimir and I met up to do a much-needed
scooter dive of Porteau Cove. It had
been far too long since having the scooters out. I had put together a new
compass mount after the dive we did at Seananus and I was itching to see how it would work
out. The tides lined up well, which helped visibility. The area had been less
than stellar with the water around Vancouver taking on a yucky shade of brown
most days. Our dive plan consisting of a
deeper average depth of 25 meters also would help.
The evening was perfect when we arrived.
However, big threatening clouds looked to be coming over Anvil Island. We could
see a big rainstorm pelting down there, so we tried to gear up quickly. I had a small
issue when I discovered that my doubles were only half full. I had forgotten
that I had been planning to do a practice dive previously that didn't need a
full fill, and neglected to check. But, we sorted it out by having both of us
take one of my full stages. I would breathe one empty, and then swap it with a
full one from Vlad. It would give us some good practice, so it worked out in
our favor. All that training was getting put to use!
It did take some time to get in the water with all our gear,
and then more time to scooter over to one of the buoys. We made the choice to
scooter out on the surface closer to the Nakaya to get out to deeper water.
Once we descended, visibility wasn't too bad. We had taken a bearing, and
followed it and the 70 foot contour and ran right into the Nakaya. Vlad was
leading, and didn't expect to find it so easily. I remember the surprised look he gave me. From there, we headed on with
a bearing of basically due north, and hit the wall beyond. It was very cool,
and I was glad we came to check it out. When the highway and railway were
constructed just above the area, a huge amount of rock had been blasted out and
dumped into the ocean. The boulders were truly massive, jagged and jumbled, and
were the most interesting part of the dive. There was not a lot of life
covering anything, but there was some. One unique thing we did not see often were cloud sponges growing in the
crevices here and there, and at a shallow depth of only 20 meters. There were
also vermillion rockfish, tiger rockfish and large lingcod. There were some
nice big white nudibranchs as well. We also came across a few long old
rusty railway rails. It was very odd seeing these rusting bits of
metal just lying around. Obviously they had been dumped here too. Maybe it was true what they
said, that a railway car was down here too somewhere!
The bottle passing went OK, but we didn't
plan so well for the large change in buoyancy. When I passed my empty and very positive
bottle to Vlad, I sank and he went up. We recovered, but it could have been
done more elegantly. More practice was needed for sure.
We planned for a 90 minute duration, and
with the average depth of 25 meters this worked out to be about 15 minutes of
decompression on oxygen. It was pretty murky when we scootered in to 6 meters
for our deco, but it was ok. We watched the flatfish and Dungeness crabs on
the sandy bottom for entertainment.
All in all, if you had a scooter, diving
the Porteau Cove wall past the Nakaya was well worth it!
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