My first fresh-water dive! I had wanted to do a fresh-water dive for a long time, and had heard about Buntzen Lake from a few people. They filmed a few episodes of the X-Files there, and a couple of movies. Buntzen Lake was a man-made lake used to feed a power generating station. I think the station was just used for an emergency backup now though.
Buntzen Lake was in Belcarra Regional Park, and was a very nice area. Very much the BC wilderness, and was very relaxing. The tree-lined drive up to the park, and the tree-covered slopes rising up from the lake waters were very nice.
When we arrived, we had to drive down to the boat launch area and drop off our gear. There was no parking near the beach, but there certainly was a lot of parking available. Once we got that sorted, we picked a picnic table close to the docks and checked out the water. The bathrooms were located as far away as you could get from us, unfortunately. There were two sets, but the closer ones were closed for the winter season. The open set was at the other end of the beach, near the enclosed dog run. An entire section of the beach was fenced off for dogs to use. That was pretty nice for dog owners, that's for sure. We were accompanied by some of Mihai's friends, and they had two dogs so that worked well. A small note, dogs were not allowed on the other areas of the beach, and a park official actually visited us and warned us of that fact. Just something to keep in mind!
The waters of Buntzen Lake were very dark and brown. It reminded me a lot of the lake waters in Ontario, brown with tannins. Signs were posted everywhere warning about a steep drop off. They weren't kidding! A few feet into the water, and it appeared to drop off to nothing.
We geared up and adjusted our weighting removing about 4-5 pounds to account for the lower density of fresh water. Our plan was to run through some skills on the first part of the dive, then explore down to about 30 meters. The water was about 5 degrees Celcius and it felt pretty cold on the face! Dropping down to about 10 meters, we did our skills. Everything went pretty well, but during my mask removal I breathed in too much and ended up ascending quite far. I got things sorted, and re-did it and it went better. Mihai had some problems with his horizontal trim, and was kicking the bottom a lot. But other than that, we got things done ok.
After that, we descended further down to 30 meters. The steep drop off ended about 25 meters or so and it gradually descended fairly flat from there. It was so dark down at 30 meters that it was like a night dive. There wasn't much to see, just an endless muddy bottom punctuated every so often by discarded beer cans. We did find three small bottom dwelling fish that looked a lot like small sculpins. I salvaged a lot of old stuff on all the dives, too. I found two pairs of sunglasses, a dog toy, a stubby beer bottle, two golf balls, and a kids scuba mask. Nothing valuable, but there must be a lot that got lost in such a popular lake! On the way up, we also came across the dead trees that people had told us about. They were very spooky looking in the dim, brown waters. Very skeletal like. One had been decorated by divers with bottles, cans, scuba masks and other junk. It was like a junk Christmas tree. There were also at least three sets of kayak paddles shoved blade up in the mud at various locations.
Surfacing, we found that the rain had really started. Poor Christina was pretty wet. Our surface interval was damp and cold, alas. So much for the nice weather! I gave the recovered dog toy to their dog friends.
On the second dive, we started at the boat dock and then swam to the east along the drop off at about 15 meters. This seemed to be where the most interesting stuff was, most notably the dead trees. Near the dock was one big dead tree that was covered with fishing line and lures from people getting snagged. I didn't recover any of these, though, and left them alone. After heading a ways east parallel to the beach, all the interesting stuff disappeared. All that was left was a slope of sand and mud. We turned back then, and found some of the dead trees to look at. There was one section of the slope that was covered in red rust-like deposits. That was about as interesting as it got! In one of the trees, we found some rainbow trout minnows. There were quite a few of them, all bunched up in the cracks in the wood. They were maybe 2 inches long, and glistened and gleamed quite nicely. Finally, we ascended back to the shallow ledge. There were a lot of underwater grasses there.
Buntzen Lake wasn't the most exciting dive location ever, but it was alright. The lack of current would make it a good place to try out new gear. Still, it's a long way to travel, and there are certainly better, more interesting dive sites in the ocean which outweighs the benefits of not having to rinse your dive gear!
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