January is gone, and I haven’t managed to get in the water this year! I’ve been travelling a lot with work, and fighting a nasty cold — On top of that, one of our ferrets passed last weekend, so the opportunity hasn’t been there.
In the meantime, however, Josh and the local GUE community have been busy with the Britannia Beach Project Baseline. Here’s the official website.
Anton North has a great write-up of a Project Baseline dive they did last weekend.
Anxious to get back in the water soon….
A pano shot stitched together from 8 photos of the Ready.
We went for a dive to kick-off the Project Baseline for Britannia Beach / the Ready. Unfortunately our dive was cut short due to an issue with one of my team-mate’s regs, but I did manage to get a few good shot in, including the 8 photos required to stitch together the above photo.
That was my first good attempt at using Hugin to stitch together photos, and it worked amazingly well, especially considering the fact that the current was pushing me into the wreck and changing my perspective with each successive photo!
Not too much else to note from this dive, and only a few photos in the gallery below. Even though it was short, it was still a good dive and we had fun. The visibility was great, so I’m looking forward to getting back out there before the spring to take some more pano series of the wreck.
After the dive, since I had plenty of gas left in my tanks, and this will be my last chance to dive for potentially over a month, I hi-tailed it down to Whytecliff Park with my drysuit still on and equipment assembled in the back of the Jeep to join up with Paul and Steve for a dive out in the Cut.
Photos below:
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!
Having had enough of my shenanigans, the Octopus is trying to blend in with some seaweed.
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.
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!
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:
Octopus in it’s Den
With weather warnings for heavy rains and heavy winds for the afternoon, I found my way to Porteau cove in the morning for some diving before the weather set in. It was raining, but I managed to get changed into my drysuit without getting too soaked with the exception of my left foot as I hadn’t properly drained my drysuit after giving it a rinse after the previous week’s dives.
Luckily there as little wind, so we popped in for a long, shallow dive hitting most of the major highlights at Porteau. The visibility was still far from great, however I was surprised to find that the particulate in the water was much smaller. Instead of large suspended particles which are a back-scatter nightmare, it seemed to be more of a haze in the water. Good news for taking photos!
A Rather Brave Sculpin, Looking Up.
One of the highlights of the dive was coming out of the front of the Granthal, and coming face to face with a seal. Unfortunately the little guy bolted pretty quick, and didn’t come back for the rest of the dive. A shame given the improving vis for non-macro photos. I have a running theory that as long as I dive with a camera, I’m more or less guaranteed not have a seal spend any significant amount of time with me. Just as well that it was afraid of people, however.
Another highlight was finding a giant octopus (reminder: harvesting any marine wildlife at Porteau Cove is illegal, and Conservation Officers do watch). It was tucked into it’s den making it hard to line up the camera, but a couple of photos turned out.
A Vividly Coloured Lingcod
Seeing both a seal close up and finding an octopus on the same dive truly made it amazing, but I suppose when you spend 106 minutes underwater, it increases the odds of seeing things! Luckily the water was still “warm”, so I didn’t get too cold at the end of the dive. In the end the severe weather warnings didn’t seem to really materialize, and we had a fantastic dive. I’m happy with the photos I got on this dive, and it’s hard to select a few to highlight in the post.
Giant Pink Starfish in Early Stages of Dissintegration
Interesting to note, last week I saw what looked to be a disintegrating Giant Pink Starfish. For the past month and a half we’ve been seeing Sunflower Starfish and Morning Sun Stars dying off en-mase, however this was the first I’d seen of another species. Today I saw plenty more of the 5-armed stars in various states of decay, confirming that another species appears to be dying off at Porteau Cove now. The Vancouver Aquarium’s AquaBlog has some thoughts on the earlier die-off, however it’s curious to see another species now dying away. Again, this could be a perfectly natural and regular occurrence, I simply don’t know. I’ve put up some photos in the gallery at the bottom of this post.
(If there’s no gallery, click the “View Full Article” link below)
I can’t say I’ve ever seen a greenish-blue Lingcod before…
Josh and I set out on this dive with a bit of a mission. I really enjoy wide-angle photography of wrecks, but given the bad visibility and the limitations of my camera (It’s not a DSLR, so I can’t slap a fisheye lens on it) I haven’t taken too much. Enter Hugin Panorama Photo Stitcher. Using that utility, I can snap a series of photos and stitch them together into a wide-angle-like photo!
The catch is that the photos need to be taken from the same spot. On the surface there’s a bit of leeway, but given the poor visibility underwater, photos need to be taken very close together so that each shot doesn’t have differing visibility. Likewise, the difference between dark on the bottom and the sun coming from the surface means a high-dynamic-range exposure shot.
A Moon Jelly. I did a blur of the water around it to get rid of the backscatter, and got a cool glowing effect.
To tackle the challenge getting a solid reference point for photos in a mild current, we experimented with deploying and anchoring an SMB a few meters above the bottom. The reference concept went well, the execution of anchoring it was a leaning experience. The photos themselves didn’t turn out good enough to stitch together (we chose a bland part of the Nakaya, more to try making a reference than get actual photos). Regardless, we came away with some really good data-points and I’m confident that I’ll be able use this method to make some interesting photos in the future.
After half an hour on the Nakaya, we headed in shallower and explored the other usual suspects at Porteau. I noticed a dead starfish, of a different species than we’d observed at Whytecliff in the previous weeks. This one I believe was a Giant Pink Starfish. Interestingly, I saw another one maybe 10-20 meters away that appeared to be normal. I’m unsure if it’s related to the mass die-off of other species or not, as one a statistic does not make. (See the next post for a greater discussion of what we observed on a dive a week later)
There were also several dead salmon scattered around the dive site as well, as it’s spawning season right now. Luckily it wasn’t littered with them!
A “dissolving” starfish. (Giant Pink Starfish)
Not too much else to say about the dive, other than the fact that we ended up staying under for 92 minutes! I’m not sure if I’ll be able to manage such long exposures in the winter when the water cools down a bit.
All in all, it was a great, well-executed dive where we tried something new and learned a lot in the process. Can’t ask for much more than that.
Some random photos in the gallery below.
A dead Starfish
In an earlier blog post, I’d mentioned that we had observed a large amount of dead starfish out at the Cut at Whytecliff, which was corroborated by a news story about a mass starfish die-off. Diving at Whytecliff again today, again we noticed pieces of starfish at around 10 meter depth on the right wall (although not quite as concentrated as they were at the cut last week). It appears to have hit only a couple species of starfish (Morning Sun Stars?), although I didn’t notice too many of the other usual suspects in the area apart from a healthy-looking slime star at depth.
The decomposition (disintegration?) appears to have greatly progressed into a grey-slime kind of state, although to be honest the grey-slime may be completely unrelated. I’m not entirely sure. Interestingly there appeared to have been some dead crabs in the area as well. I didn’t check to see if it was simply the case that the a couple of crabs had moulted in the decomposition pile, or if they were actually dead crabs.
A quick video clip (with horrible white-balancing) of an area saturated with the grey slime, and some photos of the carnage are below for documentation purposes. If any marine biologists happen to be reading this, I would appreciate an expert weigh-in in the comments below.
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.
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..
You may or may not have heard of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, basically a concentration of garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thought to be at least as big at the state of California. Here’s a very interesting article at Stefania.ca on the subject.
