Furry Creek Underwater Map 24/05/2014

Part of the Divemaster course was to complete an underwater map. I had helped my friend Jason Kolba do one ages ago, at Copper Cove. Shawn, Michael and I teamed up to do an underwater map of Furry Creek. There seemed to be a distinct lack of information on the dive site. I knew people dove there, but unlike a lot of other sites, Furry Creek seemed more word-of-mouth. I had my notes in a previous blog entry, and also found another description on Scuba Board.

We arrived early, and planned for three dives to map the 70, 50 and 30 foot contours. A new addition to the dive site was a port-a-potty up near the condo complex. I wasn't sure how long this luxury would remain, but it was a nice addition for those who need facilities!

It started out quite cloudy, with heavy rain on the drive to the site. Fortunately the rain held off for the rest of the day, and it turned sunny by the time we were done. This was a picture facing south.

We had quite the day for wildlife too. There was a turkey vulture presiding over the site when we arrived.

Hummingbirds were also buzzing around. The picture I got was very grainy, which was too bad.

In addition to those, there was a blue jay, and a weasel-like creature called a fisher capering around the beach. I'd not seen a fisher before, and it was pretty cute. Underwater, we saw a variety of small cloud sponges, rockfish, kelp crabs, plumose anemones, juvenile lion's mane jellies, and lots of coonstripe shrimp.

Here is a bit of video from the dive. Mostly dark, and green!


We first had to figure out our kick cycles versus distance. With a thick layer of white sediment in the top 10 feet of water, we decided to do this at the surface. I had brought along my underwater tape measure, so we ran out 100 feet. With three people this worked well, because 2 could hold the tape while the third swam the distance. There was a bit of a problem with timing though. Mike's and Shawn's computers would not show seconds, and I couldn't get my Xen bottom timer to go into stopwatch mode unless it was below 5 feet. Later I figured out that I could have put it into dive simulation mode, and get access to the stopwatch, but that didn't occur to me at the time. Anyway, it wasn't a show stopper because counting in your head worked just as well. Following the tape reminded me of the zero-visibility training I had done in cave diving. You really couldn't see anything. All you could do was keep an eye on your compass and depth, and your fingers around the line. For me, it took me 49 frog kicks to travel 100 feet, in 48 seconds.

For the first dive, Mike was in charge of noting compass heading and kick cycles. We decided to swim out to the white marker buoy and descend there. The idea was to use the readily available landmarks that divers would tend to see and use. It was a good thing we did, since the visibility was very bad for the first 15 feet. However, once we got to 20 feet, it was quite good. We grouped up at the bottom of the buoy chain, which was at 18 feet (it was low tide). There were two large concrete blocks there as well. Mike then took us down to the 70 foot contour, which went kind of north and that took us 3 minutes to get to. Once on the 70 foot contour it took us about 5 and a half minutes to run into the wall. Right there were small cloud sponges. Following the wall, it stayed pretty constant. The sandy bottom was at about 80 feet below us, and while the wall wasn't covered in life, there were tunicates, and many cracks that critters could live in. We weren't on a sight-seeing dive, however. It was quite dark too, as the bit of video I took showed. But the visibility was good. Our dive plan was to ascend at the end of the dive where we were to get an idea of how far along the shore we were. This would allow us to plot the underwater contour with reference to the shoreline. But, it meant for a long surface swim back!

On the second dive, I was leading. Our dive plan this time was to surface swim out half-way along the wall and descend there to find the 50 foot contour and follow it back south. There was no point following 50 feet along the wall to the north. On the descend, we weren't close enough together, and lost Shawn in the first 15 feet of water. We regrouped on the surface, and made sure to stay much closer together. I could hardly see my hand in front of my face! But again, at 20 feet, it was fine. The dive plan worked very well. Where we descended we got onto the 50 foot contour bang on. Following that led us through a bottle pile, past a chain attached to a crushed plastic blue marker buoy, and through various rock fields interspersed with sand.

Shawn led the third dive, and we used the white marker buoy again as a start-point. The plan was to head along the 30 foot contour to the wall, surface, swim back to the buoy, then head south along the same contour. It all went according to plan. On the way to the wall, we came across a chain attached to a block (the remnants of an old marker), as well as a debris field with bottles. It only took about 5 minutes to reach the wall. The rest of the 30 foot contour south was all pretty much sand. Near the end of the dive we passed the red marker buoy chain, which was another good landmark.

All told, I think we got all the information we needed to do a pretty good map! Now, to get that done!

Update: Here is my completed rough map.

And here is the final good map that Michael did.