Archive for June, 2010


Porteau Cove (June ’10)

IMG_3510 Ling Cod

Hello!

My usual dive partner was out of town this weekend, so I decided to join up with one of the local dive shops going out diving to Porteau Cove. It was a nice June morning, and we got two dives in, both primarily along the Grant Hall. This time we explored the ledge on the top portion of the hull, just below the deckline, which housed a surprisingly large amount of life. I was pleasantly surprised to see plenty of Nudibranchs around, and my first time seeing this type of nudibranch. Plenty of ling cod around as well, and I managed to get the picture on the left relatively easily. These guys/gals must have been used to having divers in their waters alot!.

IMG_3537 fried egg

Mm.. Lunch!

I also saw a fried egg jellyfish for the first time in the water, or at least the first time I’ve known enough to recognize them from other jellies. I’ve seen them at the aquarium before, so it was nice to see them in the wild, even if they were all being eaten by plumose anemones. It’s definitely a strange thing to see a jelly trying to get away from the clutches of an anemone. I think I have a video somewhere on my camera, so I’ll try and upload a clip of it later on…

One of the things I like about Porteau is that there’s quite a bit of interesting life if you look for it, in a dive site fairly close to the city. The relatively shallow dive (30-50 feet average depths for a lot of the areas) means longer dive times to poke around and look for things as well.

IMG_3545 nudibranch 4

Nudibranch!

I managed to get plenty of other interesting photos on this trip, so check out the rest of the images below the jump!

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Lions Mane Jellies at Porteau

img_3322-toilet

When you gotta go, you gotta go. Unless there's a plumose anemone living on your toilet.

Another dive at Porteau Cove. This time I had the wide-angle lens on, which in retrospect was probably was not the best choice for the dive given the poor visibility.  There were a lot of particles in the water, and the sun was shining bright causing both flaring on the lense in the shallower waters, illuminating particles even if I didn’t use the flash. I’ve still got to figure out how to mitigate those issues. I ended up taking the lens off part way through the dive.

Even though I’m not overly happy with the technical aspects of the photos I took on this trip, it’s all a learning process so I’m taking notes for the next dive. That said, I did get some interesting photos, which hopefully show some of the interesting things that can be found underwater, whether natural or man-made!

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Lion's Mane

One of my favorite photos to date is the one to the right of the Lion’s Mane Jelly! As we were swimming back towards shore to end our dive (We don’t like surface swimming, we vastly prefer to head back along the bottom using a compass) we came across a couple of these large alien-like creatures.

Unfortunately the camera wasn’t set up to take both raw and jpeg at the time so I was stuck with using the Gimp’s level tool to fix up the white balance. Using the “Auto Level” function (The lazy/easy way), I ended up with the reds really being brought out. While the real Lion’s Mane wasn’t quite as red, I found the effect so surreal and awesome that I decided to leave the photo like that. The observant reader will notice that this photo is the basis for this website’s background. (At least as of this typing, I may change it in the future)

Between snaps of the Lion’s Mane, I managed to get a short clip of it swimming. If you look carefully you can almost see how long it’s tentacles are!

More photos after the jump..

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