Category: West Coast


Out to Tuwanek

Filed Under: Tuwanek, West Coast by Roko — Comments Off on Out to Tuwanek
August 29, 2010
champion

I'm a Champion!

I’d been hearing a lot of people talking about diving in the Sechelt/Tuwanek area, so we decided to get up early and hop on the 7:35 ferry to the Sunshine coast for some diving yesterday.

As I was about to put the batteries into my strobe in the morning, I inspected the o-ring and discovered a nice cut in it. Not sure how that happened, but that meant no strobe on this trip!

We arrived see the two islets, and decided to try diving the right one first. A brief surface swim took us to the island, where we dropped down to 20 feet to make our way around the island in search of the wall on the west side. Two things stuck out immediatley:

1) There was tonnes of life!
2) The visibility was atrocious (8 feet?)!

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Anemone

We eventually made our way to the other side of the island, where we dropped down. After about 30-40 feet, the visibility cleared up to 20+ feet! We spent most of our time exploring these deeper, colder parts before popping back up to navigate around the island in the warmer and shallower waters.

There was a lot to see, including many Nudibranchs, crabs of different types, potential octopus dens (Couldn’t find the Octopus), and MANY different fish and jellies. I immediately wished I’d had the strobe with me to try and get some better photos. Luckily I did manage a few good shots.

During our surface interval, we decided to check out the left islet next, however those plans changed when we spotted a seal in the water near the right island. On our surface swim out, the seal came over to inspect us before disappearing again. Unfortunately We didn’t see the seal under the water during the dive.

All in all another great dive trip. I believe the book “151 dives” describes Tuwanek as a giant aquarium, and I think that description is fitting. I’d like to go back when the viability in the top 30 feet is better, as there’s so much to see in the shallow, but I also want to spend more time exploring the deeper parts of the wall.

Although I didn’t get many good photos on this trip, I did get a few that I like. Click bellow for more pictures..

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Point Henderson, August ’10

Filed Under: Point Henderson, West Coast by Roko — Comments Off on Point Henderson, August ’10
August 12, 2010
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Sailfin Sculpin and Hermit

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A Very Decorated Crab

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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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Porteau Cove (June ’10)

Filed Under: Porteau Cove, West Coast by Roko — Comments Off on Porteau Cove (June ’10)
June 19, 2010
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!.

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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.

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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

Filed Under: Porteau Cove, West Coast by Roko — Comments Off on Lions Mane Jellies at Porteau
June 5, 2010
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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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Strange… Things.. at Whytecliff at Night

Filed Under: West Coast, Whytecliff by Roko — Comments Off on Strange… Things.. at Whytecliff at Night
January 2, 2010

We went on a night dive at Whytecliff in early January. The fact that it was the dead of “winter” meant that we didn’t have to get into the water super-late, either. Much unlike Alberta where we’d get into the water after 10pm in the summer so that it would be dark enough.

Near the end of our dive, returning into the shallows we did see a lot of strange.. Things.. swimming about in a very peculiar fashion. I didn’t manage to get any good photos of them, but did manage to get a video showing their unique, rippling swimming motion:

At first paranoia set in, and I thought they were carnivorous earwigs of some sort attempting to swim into my ear and eat my brains. They were very interested in us, but in retrospect they may have just been attracted to my 10 watt HID. It’s a very nice dive light, I know.

After some sleuthing, Steffy figured that they were some sort of polychaete, which was confirmed by an e-mail to Andy Lamb, an expert in marine life of the PNW. Very funky creatures indeed!

I had my quasi-wide-angle lens on (Fantasea Bigeye), so I struggled a bit to try and get decent photos. I didn’t get too many, but I’ve uploaded a few of the good ones. Click below for the Gallery.

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Caulfeild Cove Evening Dive

Filed Under: Caulfeild Cove, West Coast by Roko — Comments Off on Caulfeild Cove Evening Dive
January 1, 2010

For a nice new-years-day dive, we decided to check out Caulfeild Cove. We’d heard of there being lots of old bottle and other things to search for, and thought we’d give it a try to see what we’d find. We did come up with some old bottles. Not too many photos, as the life was somewhat minimal outside of the very, very small intertidal creatures. Plenty of tiny Hermit crabs, though.

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Dungeoness Crab

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Hairy Hermit Crab

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Porteau Cove (December ’09)

Filed Under: Porteau Cove, West Coast by Roko — Comments Off on Porteau Cove (December ’09)
December 30, 2009
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Shrimp and Starfish

Shortly after checking out Whytecliff, we went to Porteau cove for the first time. The difference in  dive sites after only 20 minutes drive on the highway was amazing. We blundered around on the surface a bit trying to surface swim against a surface current before we wised up and dropped down to the shallow bottom to swim out to the dive site. A shoddy compass led us astray some more, but we eventually found the pipe reef and spent the rest of the dive poking around there. Tonnes of shrimp were out that day, and they weren’t very skittish, making it easy to take plenty of macro photos.  More photos below…

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First trip to Whytecliff (December ’09)

Filed Under: West Coast, Whytecliff by Roko — Comments Off on First trip to Whytecliff (December ’09)
December 28, 2009
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With Anemones like this, who needs friends.

After moving to Vancouver and unpacking the essentials (dive gear), our first dive trip was to Whyetcliff. We swam out along Whyte Islet during high slack tide. There was definitely a lot to see considering the lake diving that up to that point had made up most of our diving experience.

Still relatively new to underwater photography, I surprised myself by getting a few good shots of the marine life. All in all a good dive, and a nice way to settle into our new home on the Emerald Sea.

Click below to see the full gallery!

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