March 2005

Boulder Pt. Reef with 49th Parallel Dive Charters.         "A surprisingly good find"

It's interesting how sometimes the places you discount as probably not interesting, turn out to be the best finds. This reef indeed turned out to be one of those places. We had been diving the area between coffin point and Bird rock for quite some time and had found a few nice dives.

This area sits between Chemainus and Ladysmith Harbors and is bordered by the big Island and Thetis. Boulder point is not really much of  a point just happens to have a big boulder sitting on the beach. The point is about half way between Chemainus and Ladysmith. According to the charts about a mile off shore it shallows to about 4 meters and then drops off to 40 plus meters .

Finding the spot was easy, thanks to our GPS and the depth sounder. Anchoring in 10meters of water, we headed down. I was immediately surprised to be greeted by a few healthy sized Sea Urchin right where we were anchored. A quick look around here showed a reef rolling off quickly on the east side, and a little more gradual on the west and looking like a bit of a plateau running basically NW. We chose to check out the East side and head North. This was quite a pleasant swim through boulders strewn over a broken shell bottom. Plenty of Sea Cucumber, Fat Orange Plumose, with white Plumose and other anemones scattered in between. The most dominant creature here was the Feather Star, lots of them all, sitting on top of the rocks and boulders scattered all around the base of what is a Big rock outcrop that makes up the bulk of this reef. After reaching the visible end of the reef we made a wide turn back along the top towards where we started. Reaching the area where we were anchored we headed back down the east side to the foot of the reef and swam to the southern end, here we headed back along the top. Reaching the anchor again. Checking our air we had enough time for a quick look on the west side which looked very interesting for a future shallow dive. The bulk of the reef is in about 40 to 50ft of water, the foot on the east side is around 70ft and rolling off rapidly to depth. The west side looks like a nice 40 ft dive.

Lots of greenlings, some good sized rock fish, Sand dabs and crab throughout the dive. At the north end lots of small prawn. We found signs of Octopus in the area but did not find one.  

This was a pleasant paced 45 minute dive, we managed to see quite a lot of reef in this time and will definitely will be returning.