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Yellow and White Tipped Nudibranch

I’d been thinking about getting a proper dry suit undergarment for a while now, as my layered random fleece hadn’t been keeping me as warm as I’d remembered lately. Unsure if the fleece was cheap and had been over-washed, or if it was never that great to begin with, an upgrade was in order.

We decided to do a relaxed late afternoon/early evening dive at Whytecliff this weekend. This meant that we could make a quick stop at the dive shop on the way out of town, and I picked up the Whites MK III undergarment that I’d been eyeing up ever since I tried it at demo days last year.

In the water, I instantly knew I’d made the right decision to splurge on proper insulation — I was toasty warm the entire dive, without having to add more air than necessary to alleviate the drysuit squeeze. The water was a balmy 10-11 C at depths (My dive computer doesn’t seem to record minimum temperatures very well), but I’m sure this suit will do me well this winter….

The dive at Whytecliff was good, and we explored a bit more of the day marker than we had before.  The visibility was poor, it was dark at depth, and I was still without strobe (Waiting on a replacement o-ring), but I managed to get some interesting photos nonetheless.

Anemone in the Current

Of note were some cool Nudibranchs, and plenty of rockfish. Steffy even found a dive computer someone had lost. (She’s currently working on re-uniting it with it’s owner).

I spent some time taking photos of the Anemone to the right, trying to get some good shots to play around with in UFRaw and Gimp. Though I’m still learning how to touch up RAW images, I think I got some interesting results.

We each had some gas left at the end of the dive, so we spent another 15 minutes playing in the shallows of the bay. We spent most of that time surrounded by a school of Perch (I think), and found some other interesting shallow-water dwellers hiding in the seaweed and rocks.

More photos below!

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