Category: Porteau Cove


A Winter Day’s Dive at Porteau Cove

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January 15, 2012
Red Dendronotid

a rather large Red Dendronotid

hermitcrab

A Black-eyed Hermit Crab

After scraping the ice and snow off of my Jeep this morning, I made my way down to Porteau Cove with one of my dive buddies. It was a nice day hovering around zero, with a light dusting of ice and snow on the ground. Perfect for drysuit diving in cold water!

I’m pretty sure my computer measured the water at the surface at about 39 degrees F, but thankfully at depth it warmed up to about 44 degrees F. We managed two good dives, about an hour long each. My new Santi hood managed to keep me much warmer than my old hood did, so I didn’t get too chilled. For the second dive I did have to throw on an extra 4 lbs of weight so that I could inflate my drysuit some more…

I managed to get some nice pictures on this dive that I’m happy with. Without further addoo, here are the photos:

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Porteau Cove (August ’11)

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August 20, 2011
octo1

Octopus!

I went for a couple of dives at Porteau Cove on a nice hot sunny day. Although getting dressed into a black drysuit in the hot sun, with plenty of thick insulation underneath, was uncomfortable (to say the least), I soon waded into the water with my dive buddies and got to cool off.

Unfortunately my first dive was bad for photography: I’d been messing with my camera’s settings for underwater photos. To make maters worse, my right glove was leaking fast (Special thanks to my ferret Randy, who thought that all he had to do to steal my dry gloves a couple weeks prior was to bite down on them really hard), and I generally felt uncomfortable in the water.

On the second dive, however, everything clicked into place. I was very comfortable in the water, my hands had heated up the water in my now soaked “dry”-glove, and I managed to get some great photos! I was very surprised with the results — Who knew that reading up about f-stops the night before, and experimenting with them until you got the correct one would dramatically improve my underwater photography.

awesome

A bunch of sea-life. How many creatures can you count?

To make things even better, we even found a giant octopus on the second dive, who was gracious enough to let me photograph him/her. (Unlike the cantankerous longfin gunnels I’d been trying to photograph, but would always dart away as I lined up for a good angle on their faces’)

Although I didn’t get a lot of photos good, I’m rather pleased with how the good ones turned out.

Click below to see the rest of the photos!

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Porteau Cove (October ’10)

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October 27, 2010
Bow of the Granthul

Bow of the Granthul

We did a weekday dive to Porteau Cove in late October. The vis had cleared up quite a bit from what it was in the summer, apart from large chunks of algae (?) still in the water.

It was my first dive with the strobe in a while which was nice (it took a while to get a replacement o-ring). Part way through the dive, the sun came out, and illuminated everything very nicely. I managed to take some photos at 30 – 40 feet without the strobe, and they turned out great. Near the end of the dive, I came across a capped bottle of Perrier water, which actually was still mostly full! I don’t think I’ll try drinking it, though.

Lots of giant Lingcod this time, so they may figure prominently in my photos.

As always, click below for the full gallery!

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Porteau Cove (June ’10)

Filed Under: Porteau Cove, West Coast by Roko — Leave a comment
June 19, 2010
IMG_3510 Ling Cod

Hello!

My usual dive partner was out of town this weekend, so I decided to join up with one of the local dive shops going out diving to Porteau Cove. It was a nice June morning, and we got two dives in, both primarily along the Grant Hall. This time we explored the ledge on the top portion of the hull, just below the deckline, which housed a surprisingly large amount of life. I was pleasantly surprised to see plenty of Nudibranchs around, and my first time seeing this type of nudibranch. Plenty of ling cod around as well, and I managed to get the picture on the left relatively easily. These guys/gals must have been used to having divers in their waters alot!.

IMG_3537 fried egg

Mm.. Lunch!

I also saw a fried egg jellyfish for the first time in the water, or at least the first time I’ve known enough to recognize them from other jellies. I’ve seen them at the aquarium before, so it was nice to see them in the wild, even if they were all being eaten by plumose anemones. It’s definitely a strange thing to see a jelly trying to get away from the clutches of an anemone. I think I have a video somewhere on my camera, so I’ll try and upload a clip of it later on…

One of the things I like about Porteau is that there’s quite a bit of interesting life if you look for it, in a dive site fairly close to the city. The relatively shallow dive (30-50 feet average depths for a lot of the areas) means longer dive times to poke around and look for things as well.

IMG_3545 nudibranch 4

Nudibranch!

I managed to get plenty of other interesting photos on this trip, so check out the rest of the images below the jump!

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Lions Mane Jellies at Porteau

Filed Under: Porteau Cove, West Coast by Roko — Leave a comment
June 5, 2010
img_3322-toilet

When you gotta go, you gotta go. Unless there's a plumose anemone living on your toilet.

Another dive at Porteau Cove. This time I had the wide-angle lens on, which in retrospect was probably was not the best choice for the dive given the poor visibility.  There were a lot of particles in the water, and the sun was shining bright causing both flaring on the lense in the shallower waters, illuminating particles even if I didn’t use the flash. I’ve still got to figure out how to mitigate those issues. I ended up taking the lens off part way through the dive.

Even though I’m not overly happy with the technical aspects of the photos I took on this trip, it’s all a learning process so I’m taking notes for the next dive. That said, I did get some interesting photos, which hopefully show some of the interesting things that can be found underwater, whether natural or man-made!

img_3336-auto-level-jelly

Lion's Mane

One of my favorite photos to date is the one to the right of the Lion’s Mane Jelly! As we were swimming back towards shore to end our dive (We don’t like surface swimming, we vastly prefer to head back along the bottom using a compass) we came across a couple of these large alien-like creatures.

Unfortunately the camera wasn’t set up to take both raw and jpeg at the time so I was stuck with using the Gimp’s level tool to fix up the white balance. Using the “Auto Level” function (The lazy/easy way), I ended up with the reds really being brought out. While the real Lion’s Mane wasn’t quite as red, I found the effect so surreal and awesome that I decided to leave the photo like that. The observant reader will notice that this photo is the basis for this website’s background. (At least as of this typing, I may change it in the future)

Between snaps of the Lion’s Mane, I managed to get a short clip of it swimming. If you look carefully you can almost see how long it’s tentacles are!

More photos after the jump..

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Porteau Cove (December ’09)

Filed Under: Porteau Cove, West Coast by Roko — Leave a comment
December 30, 2009
IMG_1880_shrimp_starfish_FB_Cropped

Shrimp and Starfish

Shortly after checking out Whytecliff, we went to Porteau cove for the first time. The difference in  dive sites after only 20 minutes drive on the highway was amazing. We blundered around on the surface a bit trying to surface swim against a surface current before we wised up and dropped down to the shallow bottom to swim out to the dive site. A shoddy compass led us astray some more, but we eventually found the pipe reef and spent the rest of the dive poking around there. Tonnes of shrimp were out that day, and they weren’t very skittish, making it easy to take plenty of macro photos.  More photos below…

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