Category: Whytecliff


Last Dive of the Year, at The Cut.

Puget Sound King Crab

A Small Puget Sound King Crab

After a thwarted dive at Britannia Beach in the morning, I made my way down to Whytecliff Park where Paul and Steve were waiting for me to join them on a dive.

We hopped into the cut for a nice dive. Although it was a bit chilly on the surface, it warmed up a bit once we got below the thermocline. The visibility was amazing by Vancouver standards, and I managed to spot a really good diverse number of critters. Unfortunately I didn’t get any shots I love this time out, but I got some good shots of the different critters I saw.

I’m begining to think my perceived decrease in good photos is being caused by getting too close to the subject. I used to zoom in somewhat, and take photos from futher back, casting smoother lighting with my single strong. I think by getting too close it’s making the lighting too sharp. A second strobe to even things out sure would be nice..

Grunt Sculpin

A Grunt Sculpin…

One of the critters was another Grunt Sculpin, which I managed to get some half-decent shots of. One of my favorite local species, and I always struggle to get decent photos. One of the reasons is that I usually see then on a bottom covered in shells, which is really hard to properly expose with the highly-reflective whites. They also don’t like to properly pose, always hopping about on the bottom when you get close…

Plenty of different crabs as well, as evidenced in the top photo, and all the photos in the gallery below.

Not too much else to say about this dive, it was a good way to end off the diving year. Now for a work-induced dry spell, and then back at it again!

The rest of the photos are below:

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A Good Dive at Whytecliff

Hairy Spined Crab

A Hairy Spined Crab hiding in a Glass Sponge

Only an entire 5 days after the dive, I’ve managed to finally get these photos proccessed and uploaded!

We hopped into the Cut at Whytecliff, to enjoy a nice long dive looking at glass sponges before heading back in towards the bay, in the hopes of finding an octopus. Sadly no such luck finding an octo, but a good dive nonetheless. We made it around through to the giant underwater “ridge” in the bay towards the islet, which was a nice treat. I haven’t dove on that feature in quite a while. I had a bit of trepidation after not finding the leak that caused a fairly large flood in my drysuit last week, but I stayed dry this time. It was probably something stuck in my dump valve, which I’d flushed out with water.

Glass sponges are interesting to see, since not only are they an intricately shaped themselves, they harbour a lot of different critters, especially many, many different types of crab and shrimp. This dive did not disappoint in that respect, and we found several Hairy Spined Crabs, Squat Lobsters and Hermits hiding around the sponges. I even found a Butterfly crab, which was an nice treat although not in or near any sponges. I’ve got some interesting photos of things hiding in sponges below.

Giant Nudibranch

A Giant Nudibranch, illuminated with my canister light.

Heading back into the bay, my strobe began to act up, again. I’ve been putting off getting new batteries for far too long and finally paid for it — My strobe died, and I was greeted by many various nudibranchs, including Giant Nudibranchs, and my favourite local fish, a Grunt Sculpin posing nicely. I tried illuminating with my can light, and got some okay pictures out of it. Long story short, I bought some new batteries this week. I don’t want to get caught without a strobe on a good dive, for the nth time.

The cool thing about the Giant Nudibranchs was the variation in the colour/highlights on them. Seeing many in a small area really allowed for a nice comparison. Also spotted was what appeared to be some sort of Nudibranch egg ribbon.

Cucumber

Some sort of Sea Cucumber?

An interesting, unidentified, critter we found is the one on the left. The best suggestion so far is that it’s a Red Sea Cucumber, which tends to hide within crevices and feed with it’s arms/frills. The interesting thing is that Red Sea Cucumbers are typically VERY red, whereas this critter has a white body with orange “frills”. I’m not sure if there is that much colour variation within the species, or if this is a related species of cucumber. If anyone has an answer, let me know!

I think I’m getting the hang of using Darktable for photo editing, this batch turned out much nicer than the previous ones. I think I’ll have to go back and try to fix up some of the old photos as well.

More photos below:

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Octopus at Whytecliff

Juvenile Giant Pacific Octopus

Juvenile Giant Pacific Octopus and Friend

30-Nov-13: I’m part way through re-editing some of these photos to improve the colours and contrast. 

Every time I step away from diving for a while, I need the first part of a dive to shake out both my dive skills, as well as my photography skills. So, after having spent a month out of the water due to a busy work scheduled (which seemed much longer than a month!), I was excited to get back into the water and getting back into the groove. As luck would have it, the first warm-up photos I took were of an Octopus, out in the middle of the bay at Whytecliff!

Juvenile Giant Pacific Octopus

Having had enough of my shenanigans, the Octopus is trying to blend in with some seaweed.

This little guy was definitely a treat to see as we were starting our dive. I initially thought (and posted) that it was a Red Octopus, but due to the lack of distinct papillae, it may acrually have been a juvenile Giant Pacific Octopus — I’m not entirely sure. With a bit of excessive finning and fiddling with camera settings (Definitely wasn’t in the zone at the start of the dive at that point), I managed to snap some photos. In retrospect, I have a list of different settings I would have liked to tried, but the photos turned out well regardless.

The cool thing about this little guy was how he was changing his colour and texture to blend in with the background a bit better. As I snapped a batch of photos, it started to wrap itself in seaweed to hide better, and we decided to leave him/her alone and carry on with our dive.

The rest of the dive was fun, but eventually I found myself drawn back to the Octo. We got back up to the depth where we hit the wall face, and just before swimming back out into the bay to see if the Octopus was still there, my arm got cold. And wet. Very fast. Catastrophic suit failure! I thumbed the dive, signaling an ascent up the slope and we proceeded into the bay for a nice slow end to the dive. Luckily only my arm got wet, but it was saturated. I haven’t found the leak yet, it was definitely in from the dry-glove ring, as my hand stayed dry.

Swimming Anemone

A Swimming Anemone, conveniently NOT swimming.

As a side note, I’ve been playing with Darktable again for editing photos. I’m running it on my Linux laptop, which has a really, really nice display. I’m finding photos don’t look quite as nice on other displays, sometimes the colours are rather dull. I have to dial it in to get my post-processing right, something to work on.

I now have to find my drysuit leak before diving again, hopefully it’ll be an easy find and fix. I’ve got a patch kit and spare seals so I’m fairly confident I’ll be back in the water soon. While I think about it, I need to rebuild one of my second stages as well.. It never ends!

 

 

Starfish Die-Off Update

Starfish

A healthy looking starfish

It was a bit eerie not seeing the usual wall of starfish due to the die-off, however I did see some healthy starfish sporadically through the dive, as evidenced in the photos below. Only one starfish in late-stage disintegration, which was unidentifiable. Hopefully the population will recover from this, one of the theories is that it’s a Malthusian check on the over-population of the starfish in the past few years.

More photos in the full article:

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Stepping into Doubles at Whytecliff

Hermit Crab

A brave Hermit Crab who didn’t hide when I came in close for a great photo

Cold water diving necessitates thick insulation, which in turn requires a lot of weight to sink. With a steel tank, 5kg steel backplate and another 6kg of lead, I decided I needed more weight on my back, so I switched to doubles. Luckily the rigging for doubles is heavy enough to allow losing some of the lead ballast, but the entire rig is still rather heavy on the surface.

In the water, the doubles were a dream — They trimmed out well, and I didn’t have to fight them. After a sloppy valve drill (need to work on that) I felt comfortable enough to carry on with the dive and start taking photos.

The next step is to polish my skills and upgrade to a Fundies Tech pass…

Painted Greenling

A Painted Greenling posing nicely. Ironically, they’re not green.

Just one long dive today, starting in the bay then heading out to the plumose gardens. There was a touch of current out in the gardens due to the large interchange, but it was a good dive regardless. Plenty of rockfish, squat lobsters, hermit crabs, nudibranchs of various types and the other usual suspects. I managed to snap some photos I’m happy with today.

We found a cool glass sponge at about 22 meters as well. One thing I love about glass sponges is that it provides hiding places for so many small critters, and it’s a lot of fun to peek into all the nooks and crannies to  see what you’ll find.

The Starfish die-off was still very evident today, and I’ve documented that in a separate post.

Residents of the Glass Sponge

A Hermit Crab and a Shrimp sharing a crevice in the Glass Sponge

After we had thumbed the dive, on the ascent I found a Grunt Sculpin peaking out from a giant barnacle, the perfect photo opportunity. Unfortunately a thumbed dive is a thumbed dive, and with my camera stowed I couldn’t get a photo. It looked like there was a lot of interesting things in that area (near the rocks by the day marker) so I’ll have to go back sometime and look for photo opportunities.

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Decorator on Sponge

A Decorator Crab on a Glass Sponge — Illuminated by my Can Light.

Another dive site I’ve somehow neglected since moving out here has been “The Cut” at Whytecliff. So, in good measure Josh and I decided to go dive it. The Cut itself is a fun dive site, with an interesting descent that ultimately leads incredibly deep. We stopped at 30 meters and went to see the glass sponges that are one of the signatures of the Cut. Unfortunately the fiber optic to sync my stobe was loose and my strobe wouldn’t fire on the first dive. I managed a couple of photos using my can light to illuminate, but nothing special.

The Glass Sponges are really interesting. Very intricately shaped, with lots of good hiding spots for critters. There was one with a false lobster hanging out which would have made a fantastic photo. Definitely a spot worth checking out.

Glass Sponge

Ambient Light photo of a large Glass Sponge.

Our second dive we decided to swim from the cut into the bay. A bit of current worked against us so I didn’t take too many photos in the anenome garden. Again, not too many great photos out of this dive, but the dive itself was great, especially exploring the bay which seemed to be full of Frosted Nudibranchs. I even saw a yellow and white-tipped Nudi, but unfortunately the photo didn’t turn out well. The dive was capped off with some drills and a very smooth free-water ascent.

Interestingly, the shallows around the cut seemed to be full of dead, half disintegrated starfish. This was rather unusual. Later in the week after the dive some news articles started popping up about the mysterious die-off: “Massive Starfish Die-Off Baffles Scientists“. I’m curious if this is a natural phenomenon (Population surge, disease, etc.) or something related to humans (pollution, etc). I didn’t get any photos of the dead starfish at the time, because to be honest it wasn’t the most photogenic subject. I’ll try and get some shots to document it next time I’m out. In the meantime, the link I posted above has some shots of the phenomenon. Also some tin-foil-hat worthy comments in the comments section….

Some photos from the dive below the jump..

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Whytecliff in April

Another Rockfish

A Copper Rockfish posing

I hoped on for a couple of dives at Whytecliff, the first dive to the usual Plumose Gardens, the second dive we hopped in on the far side of Whyte Islet and swam around back into the bay. Since there was a rather large interchange going in from low to high, part of the dive was a great drift dive with some great current pushing is around and back towards the bay (usually).

The weather itself cooperated very nicely, with the sun popping out to warm us up during our surface interval. This proved far nicer than the cold, rainy, windy surface intervals of the winter.  Looks like summer is on it’s way at long last.

A Cool Fish

This shot turned out well. Usually the small fish don't pose nicely.

I managed a couple of decent photos on this trip, including a couple of snaps of a Rhinoceros crab. It’s funny how you can go so many dives without seeing a specific type of animal, but once you see it and know what to look for, you see them everywhere. There was even a hairy spined crab, but it scurried away into a crevice before I could set up a good shot…

The second dive around the Islet proved to be interesting, with the currents of a very low tide starting to come back in. First it was pushing us around the Islet towards the bay, then it seemed like we were fighting it to get back in towards the bay (although not quite as strong that time). It was a fun dive, though. It probably would have been more of a struggle if we didn’t time it roughly with the tides given the day’s interchange.

 

Onto the photos:

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An Unknown Nudibranch...

An Unknown Nudibranch...

Admittedly, this article wasn’t published anywhere near March 3rd, the date the photos were taken. But, in keeping with the the tradition, I’m forcing the post dates to the dates of the photos, making it easier for viewers to correlate conditions and what can be seen by date.

Anyways, I’ve been doing a lot of diving without a camera this month (Taking GUE Fundamentals), and I haven’t had a chance to get these photos processed until recently. On that note, I’ve been playing around with a program known as “Darktable” for processing RAW photos. Darktable is an open source (read: Free) alternative to Lightroom. I’m still learning the ropes of the new software, but I like what I see so far. The images in this post were all processed in Darkroom, however I must admit they weren’t the best exposed photos I’ve taken, which is perhaps why I’ve taken so long to edit them and upload them. I couldn’t seem to make them look decent in UFRaw and GIMP, however Darktable made it easier. Or perhaps I’m just more motivated towards the end of the month.

Hairy Spined Crab

A Hairy Spined Crab

On to the actual dives!

I went out to Whytecliff for a couple of dive swith a new buddy with whom I would be taking GUE Fundamentals in the coming weeks. Although I haven’t always had much luck of getting great shots of cool critters at Whytecliff, I was pleasantly surprised on this dive with a wide variety of crabs. Some of the cooler crabs which I’d never seen before were the Rhinoceros Crab and the Hairy Spined Crab, both very unique and funky crabs.  Unfortunatley I couldn’t seem to expose them quite right, so the photos aren’t as good as they could be. Also of note was the large number of HUGE Tanner Crabs, which appeared to be mating.

The full gallery is available below:

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Whytecliff, January ’12

Decorator Crab

A decorator crab on a sponge.

After a crazy week of Vancouver snow and freezing rain, I skipped on over to Whytecliff park for a couple of dives. Luckily it had warmed up to above zero, and the snow had been washed away by all the rain. Unfortunately, the rain appeared to have washed the snow straight into the ocean, causing some pretty bad viz (10-20 feet.. Bad for winter, good for summer!) and cold temperatures on the dive.

At Whytecliff itself, there were some swells making entry and surface swimming a lot more fun. The tide was high, so we didn’t have to scramble over too many big rocks to get in. Instead of surface swimming around towards the day marker, we elected to descend early and go through the bay underwater to avoid some of the swell.

Sunstar Arm

If you've ever wondered what the tube-feet on one of a Sunstar's many arms look like, this is it.

Underwater I didn’t feel it was my best photography day, as I didn’t find too many critters posing nicely (though I found quite a few who flat out refused to co-operate). I spent a large portion of the dives fiddling with my buoyancy and trying to stay still in the frigid waters. (The coldest my computer read was 43 F, but it has an averaging algorithm that I think misses some of the more brutal thermoclines).

At some points on the northern part of the bay, you could see where the fresh water runoff was mixing with the salt water. Always a trippy effect that makes it hard to see, as everything turns blurry.

Even though the sun wasn’t out, it was fairly bright at around 20ft, so I attempted to take some shots without the flash in the shallows. It was a bit awkward, as making the shutter speed any less than 1/60s introduced too much motion blur, while pumping the ISO up to 400 introduced too much noise in the camera. Fiddling with the RAW files made things look  more interesting. Unfortunately, the poor vis made it hard to take any decent shots. It did make me wish I had a wide angle lens for this camera, however…..

Below are some of the photos:

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Seal at Whytecliff

We went for an evening dive after work yesterday. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any good photos, but a seal did come visit us underwater for a while!

Whytecliff, Sept ’11

Scuplin

A Really Cool Sculpin

Andrea, a friend and dive instructor was leaving for New Zealand for a lengthy period of time, and organized a great going away barbeque and dive day at Whytecliff. When we got there, Paul and I rushed to get into the water. The first dive I took my wide angle lens with me, and we dove the islet in the hopes that the seal we’d spotted on the surface would come visit us. He didn’t. That jerk. Unfortunately the Vis wasn’t so great, so I didn’t manage to get a lot of good photos with the wide angle on the first dive. However, we did see a really cool scuplin. On the way back through the bay, I spotted an octopus hiding beneath a concrete block, though he was way too tucked in to manage a good photo. After the dive, on our swim back to shore we saw a mink hop into the water and take a quick swim. Way too cool!

Hermit

Hermit Crab! (And a tiny Nudibranch)

On our second dive, we swam around to the plumose gardens. It was amazing how much life there was in the area. Not only were there tonnes of plumose anenomes as the name implied, but there appeared to be a large population of hermit crabs which I managed to snap a few  great photos of. Part way through the dive, we hear a VERY loud boat overhead, I assumed it was the ferry. Carrying on, plenty of other fish were to be seen. It was an amazing dive, and I pulled some great photos from the camera.

I pulled close to my NDLs on this dive as I was on Air. I thought I’d save $10 and not get my usual EAN32 fill, as I had intended to do some shallower diving with these tanks on a dive day that ended up being cancelled. As a result I had a less than optimal gas for the dive, and had to ascend earlier than I would have liked to avoid going into deco. With plenty of gas left in the tank, but a nitrogen loading preventing me from staying at an interesting depth, I spent 10 or so minutes practicing holding mid-water stops at 20, 15 and 10 feet, using only my computer and the silt in the water as a visual reference.

Octopus (Cake)

An Epic Octopus Cake!


Once we surfaced we noticed that a hovercraft had come into the bay and parked on shore for a good will visit (and for some free BBQ food!). As it ends up that loud ship we’d heard wasn’t a ferry, but the hovercraft coming in. I’ve posted photos in another post.

For Andrea’s barbeque, someone had made an incredible octopus cake, clutching a detailed scuba diver. The attention detail in the cake was so amazing, the eye even looked like an octopus eye! It was a shame to eat it in the end.

A great day with great people. And Andrea, if you’re reading this from NZ, I hope you’re enjoying your trip!

More photos are below. I’ve added notes regarding some specific images below if you view them full-sized.

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