Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Nanaimo Wrecks 16/04/2011

Jason Kolba and I signed up to go on the new/old SeaDragon that was now running out of Nanaimo. Dan from the Mamro was captaining it, along with Christine who helped do some of their accounting, and was also a dive master. Christine said that she already felt she knew Jason and I since we had been out on the Topline and Seadragon more times than anyone in the last year. We both thought that was pretty funny.

The Seadragon was much as we had remembered it. Nothing had changed. There was still the upper sundeck that was great in the sun but crap in the wind/rain. The back swim grid was roomy and Jason and I were put there with our doubles. These two benches were the only real area for doubles anyway as there were cylinder circles welded onto the benches. The midship deck was still covered but a bit cramped. 8 divers could get in there in a pinch but it wouldn't be fun. Jason and I were lucky to have the swim grid to ourselves. The reward for diving doubles I guess! I had my stage along too just for fun.

We had a pretty full boat. An instructor was doing the final dives for a class, and some others from out of town were fun-diving for the whole weekend.

Christine and Dan made the trip very pleasant. Coffee, soup, nanaimo bars and lots of friendly chat and help. Dan had a few stories about Steve Redding who from IDC who used to help on the Mamro dive charter for him.

The day started off cold but sunny. It turned miserable for a time during our surface interval but then turned sunny again for the trip home.

We did the Cape Breton first. Our dive plan was for 50 minutes and an average depth of 80 feet. We were going to circumnavigate the wreck, but current stopped us from getting as far as we wanted. Visibility was not that great either, maybe 15 feet. Too bad since it was Jason's first time on them. It was still a good dive though. We went through some of the swim-throughs and saw some big cabezon along with rainbow shrimps. On the ascent I did a mask removal for practice and froze my forehead. The water was cold!

On the surface the weather had turned. It was choppy, rainy and windy. Not nice! We had some lunch and relaxed a bit. My new Xen dive computer's battery failed, which wasn't good. However several other people had reported the same problem. Guess mine had it too. Good thing I had my backup bottom timer.

We moved the boat to the Saskatchewan and geared up for the next dive. The chop made it difficult to tie up the boat. Christine and Dan tried 4 or 5 times before success. We went down amidships, and followed a similar 50 minute dive profile, but with a shallower average depth. We checked out the deck guns first, and I took out the new dive buddy, JD (Just Duck) for a photo shoot. I had to stick him inside the gun barrel because he floated so much. It was also pretty impressive how crushed he was at 90 feet! Poor guy.

Stuff we saw were large cabezons, a brown box crab, a huge yellow eye rockfish, and tonnes of anemones. Everything seemed covered in them. There we're no nudibranchs that I saw, except for a shag mouse nudibranch on the ascent/descent line.

A good set of two dives, and it was good to see a good charter operation move into Nanaimo now that Diver's Choice had met such hard times and closed.

2 comments:

  1. You mention that your "Xen Dive Computer" battery died, are you using the Xen bottom timer, the Xeo dive computer or the Zen Dive Computer? Looking to buy one and heard of stories about all 3, just want to clarify which you had.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Informative post!! Thank you for the detailed information!
    scuba gear package

    ReplyDelete