Tag Archive: Island


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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Point Henderson, August ’10

sailfin-sculpin

Sailfin Sculpin and Hermit

crab-1

A Very Decorated Crab

yellow-crab

Cool Yellow Crab - Can Anyone ID it?

My Parents were in town and wanted to head out to the Island. We haven’t had the chance to go diving on the Island yet, so we figured this would be a great chance to go diving while my Parents relaxed and took a swim in the water in a nice location. I’m not sure why exactly we chose Point Henderson given all the other choices, but it ended up being a nice dive spot. Luckily we went on a Thursday, so there was some parking available in the small loop — I can’t imagine it on a weekend. Special thanks to my Parents for putting up with our diving habit!

We started out the dive by swimming more or less straight out from shore until we hit the 60′ reef, then hooked a left and went exploring. Immediately we were amazed by how much there was to see: shrimp, crabs, starfish, jellyfish, brave rock fish that wouldn’t swim away… The only thing that would have made it better would have been an octopus, wolf-eel or six gill shark! (Itemsstill on my list of local marine life I want to see).

Once again, I started the dive off with the wide-angle lens and ended up taking it off pretty quickly. The Fantasea Bigeye isn’t easy to put back on again when you’re using drygloves, so once it comes off it tends to stay off…

After hitting our turn pressure, and coming back up we found we still had a lot of air left (A lot of time was spent looking into nooks and crannies before we turned) so we kept going until we found the shallow reef and used up the rest of our air there. It was interesting to see the difference in life between the two. The sun was so bright in the water that I didn’t need to use my strobe in the shallow water. (And struggled with over-exposing some of the photos with my manual settings). We saw a lot of interesting yellow crabs which we haven’t been able to identify. If anyone knows what they are, please leave a comment!

I’m sure I missed a lot of small/camouflaged/hidden creatures at this dive site, so I’d definitely like to get back someday.

Click below to see more photos!

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