Welcome to dive.roko.ca!

I’ve stared putting up dive photos and information on my robotics blog, roko.ca, but somehow it just didn’t see to fit in with quadrupeds and sumo robots. As such, I’ve decided to start up this diving specific blog, where I’ll share photos from my dive experiences, mainly for terrestrial-bound friends and family, to show the wonders of the Emerald Sea, and other dive trips I go on!

I’ll slowly start uploading old photos, and will update whenever I go diving, so stay tuned and subscribe to my RSS Feed!

Hangin' out on a safety stop. (Not in BC)

A large propeller, with a Lingcod sitting on it.

A new site was recently discovered by the Shipwreck Exploration and Conservation Society, containing several wrecks which have sunk over the past few years. Some friends had dove it the previous week, and located lots of interesting things. Finally being free and not having to work on a weekend, I joined them this past weekend to explore the sites.

As a quick note to any divers who may be heading out to these wrecks, they have many fragile parts and there are several Lingcod egg masses in the area. Please be careful to not damage these wrecks, or disturb the endangered life in an area slowly recovering from the damage done over the years by the mine run-off. Good buoyancy and and propulsion skills are a must, as these will quickly disintegrate from too many unskilled divers abusing this site.

Looking along the bow of the coastguard cutter wreck

Initially we dove a site away from the two main wrecks, and explored some smaller sunken boats and a bunch of “junk”. In the top 30 or so feet near our exit point, there was a rock bed which held a nice amount of life, providing opportunities for some nice macro photography.

It was really interesting diving the two wrecks, however without a wide angle lens, and a camera that doesn’t handle poor light that well, taking photos of the wreck was difficult. I managed to get some good shots after playing around with settings however. Fiddling around with the white balancing of the RAW photos in UFRaw yielded some interesting results, but ultimately I think black and white provided the best results for the wreck photos. I was left wishing I had a wide-angle lens, and a camera with better low light sensitivity…

A neat shrimp, just over 1 inch in length. I must have taken 30 photos with various settings to get it just right...

Swimming up and down the two wrecks provided for some interesting macro opportunities as well, as life is taking hold on them. From some larger nudibranchs, various fish, and tonnes of shrimp. These made me wish I had a macro lens! I think I might opt for some macro wet lenses for my case in the next little while…

Once again, I urge the utmost caution with this site. It’s very fragile, and will deteriorate very quickly if we as a dive community do not take care of it.

Below are the rest of the photos:

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1. Guide to Underwater Photography – Perhaps one of the best resources I’ve found. This site covers topics ranging from getting started to advanced techniques, compact cameras to DSLRs, and more. There is also a good discussion on strobes and strobe positioning. A very highly recommended read.
2. Canon G11/G12 and S90/S95 Underwater Photography – A useful link for Canon Camera compact cameras.  Although it is geared towards the Powershot G11, the G10, G12, S90, S95, etc are very similar cameras and the discussion is applicable to those cameras as well.

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.

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:

[View with PicLens]

a rather large Red Dendronotid

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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This guy and several of his cohorts were hiding in a crack in the rocks. I think it's a Squat Lobster (aka "pinch bug")

A very small Anemone. There were plenty of these tiny guys on the wall.

In the fall, Paul introduced me to Furry Creek. Since then, I’ve been back a couple of times, and really enjoy it as a dive site. The wall has a nice amount of life (including a wolf eel!), plus in the shallows are some old bottles to dig through. This time around I found Pepsi-Cola bottle from the early 1950′s.

It was my first trip out with the camera in a while. The first dive I dove with the case empty, but satisfied when there were no leaks I took the camera with me on the second dive. I managed to get a few good photos, however right when I found a giant frosted Nudibranch that I really wanted a photo of, the strobe stopped syncing. I’ll need to adjust the fiber optic sync setup I’ve jury-rigged before my next dive.

Without further adoo, the photos are below.

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The case feels much more professional than the Canon case, and hopefully will prove to be sturdier. The photo below shows a nice comparison in the size and construction between the two cases, with the Ikelite case on the left, and the WP-DC28 case on the right.

Ikelite (L) and Cannon (R) Cases

Anyways, I won’t be posting any photos for the next little bit until I can fix or replace my case…

Roko.

Birds on the lifeboat crane.

… Another day closer to sinking it.