After seeing Jim, Dennis and Jo scootering in the Nomash Cave, I figured it had been too long since I'd been out for a scooter dive to. Vlad and I got our gear and headed out to Porteau Cove for a Wednesday night dive. It was a perfect evening. The heat wave had subsided for a bit, and it even rained some during the day.
Our plan was for an hour and a half run time with some decompression on oxygen. Visibility was a challenge at the start and end of the dive. We were basically in touch contact while we scootered out to the Nakaya. It was still fun, doing it all by compass but a bit nerve wracking because we almost ran into the pipe reef on the way!
Once we got below 30 feet / 9 meters visibility improved. The water temperature also plummeted to about 9 degrees as we passed through a distinct thermocline. There was also a huge swarm of moon jellies that made it like a doge-em video game. Unfortunately at least one got sucked through my prop despite my best efforts. Sorry moon-jelly!
We missed the Nakaya on the way out due to the challenging vis, and aimed instead for the rock wall. Half our dive was planned at 100 feet / 30 meters, and the visibility was around 20-30 feet which was quite good. I did some rockfish counting for the Rockfish Abundance Survey and just generally enjoyed the dive. The boulders and rocks were always interesting, with cloud sponges and anemones here and there. There were several large ling cod, and a few white nudibranchs. At the end of the scooter Vlad deployed his GPS on a string and got a fix for how far we went.
On the way back was the best part. We came across five Dogfish sharks at various points. Several of them were at least 4 feet long and very cool. I had not seen so many Dogfish at once in a long time. This was not one of my pictures, but came from Wikipedia.
We also came across a wrecked car chassis on the bottom. We had come across similar wrecks before, but this time Vlad took a GPS reading so we could reference where it was on a map.
We successfully found the Nakaya on our way back. It was continuing to deteriorate and with the bad vis and an ever increasing dive-time we needed to keep going. We headed past the Grant Hall, and the vis just kept getting worse. We got onto the fire hose then headed in to the bay. At 6 meters we started our deco and tried to see anything in the soup. There was one last Dogfish surprisingly, as well as about a million Pacific Snake Pricklebacks. It was fun and challenging to do some deco in such conditions. Finally we surfaced and were not far from the stairs. The current was quite impressive and we had to use our scooters to get us back.
All in all a very fun and successful dive!
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