Topline 26/05/2012

After Heather's Rescue Course, Ken at Ocean Quest had a special deal for the people who completed it: a boat dive with the Topline at a reduced rate. Too good to pass up!
We met at Horseshoe Bay as normal at 8am. It was a pretty good looking day, calm and not too warm. The sun was out periodically, but it was mostly cloudy all day.
Ken had method in his madness: some of the divers on the boat were Dive Master candidates, working on their program. Heather and I were paired with a fellow named Dale. He had won the coin toss to accompany the experienced divers instead of the new open water students who were along. We both thought it was very amusing that people were fighting over us.
Kevin and Jan were their usual awesome hosts. There were 18 divers on the boat, and even with all those people it ran extremely smoothly thanks to their organizing and Ken's. The first site we went to was South Bowyer. The idea was to look for the wolf eel that had taken up residence under a rock about 5 minutes north of the tie-up line. Ken told Heather and I to spring some tasks on Dale during the dive, but we didn't have the heart. I made a mistake looking for the wolf eel. What you were supposed to do was descend the line, then head north up the canyon, sticking to the right hand wall. When the canyon ran out, you had to follow it on to the right almost to a saddle of rock that was covered in plumose anemones. There was a metal grate on the bottom, and not far from that was a small rock. Under that rock was the wolf eel. If you went over the saddle of rock and hit a drop-off, you had gone too far. We ended up going too far, oops. Even though we missed the wolf eel, we still had a very nice dive. We went around the back side of the canyon and saw lots of plumose anemone beds. Then, coming back around to the up-line, we came across a small power boat sitting on the bottom. Not much of a wreck, but still a wreck! Even though we looked under it, there was nothing interesting there to be found.
After a nice long surface interval and lunch, we dove the North Bowyer site. On that dive, Ken came along too. Once again, it was a very nice relaxing dive with a lot more plumose anemones and some pretty decorator crabs. The highlight was two lion's mane jelly fish. One small one that had some of its tentacles trapped by a plumose anemoe that Dale cut free, and one really big one with tentacles stretching maybe 10 feet. We kept our distance, but it was awesome to see.
Dale was more worried about someone doing something, and nothing happened at all. I think Ken did a good job of psyching him out!
An awesome trip with the Topline! Here is a bit of video: