Home

Cedar Beach  Lodge
Our Dive packages
Our Day Trips
Our Newsletter
Our Diving
Our Wrecks
Our Boeing
Our Mission
Our Guiding
Our Boats
Our Weather
Our Rates
Our Contact info
How to get here
Thetis Ferry
Equipment Rental
Photo Gallery
Andy's Top Ten
Places to Stay
Awards & News
Links
Soap Box
Ford Lehman
Kubvan Site
Yamaha
Alwest
King Tides

 

 

February 2005

Sail Fin Rocks.

A foggy Saturday morning brought us to a rock about a 1/4 mile off shore right below the old power station on Bare point just outside Chemainus Harbour. 

The charts for Stuart Channel indicate a rock  at a depth of 8.5 Meters. After quite a bit of searching we could only find a bottom profile that came up to about 18 meters. Tossing the anchor in and rolling off the boat we headed down. Reaching the bottom we found a rather smooth large rock hummock at indeed 18 meters.

After doing a survey of the area surrounding our anchor, we headed east, then North. The area has quite a lot of good sized Orange Plumose The perimter of the rock is in about 20 meters of water. Although we continued to see lots of Plumose through out the dive we only saw a hand full of rock fish. They all appeared to be black rock fish sometimes called Sea bass, around here. Heading some distance North we finally came around the north end of the rock and started to head back in a south west direction. 

For more dive sites in this area check out Bare Point and Bare rock.

We did find the odd Sea cucumber and Nudibranch, and although we saw lots of crab shell, we did not see any crab. Now whether they have been fished out  by people or Octopus there is no way to know. Swimming for some time it appeared as if we were coming up on the southern tip of the rock we had been swimming when another large rock appeared in the distance a little farther west. Heading in that direction we found some lost prawn and crab traps. Heading south west along this new rock was where we found a Sail Fin Sculpin about 6 to 8 inches long, hence the name of the rocks. We followed this new rock around until we got to an area that dropped off where we headed down to about 25 meters. Here we found quite a lot of interesting topology, a shear wall with more rock fish, brittle stars, and sea cucumber. The rock face we were swimming along broke up into several Large boulders that you could swim around and through, the terrain then started to lead us back North past the crab traps and towards our point of entry. Swimming through more plumose forests, we came back up to the 18 meter level where getting low on air we started our ascent.

We called this Sail fin rocks because it appeared that the reef was made up of two major large rocks, of which the coolest resident was the Little Sail Fin Sculpin. It was not rich with life but was kind of a fun dive. The water seemed a lot warmer today compared to dives of the past weeks. Viz was a little less about 10 meters, warmer water must be starting some bloom, Herring season will soon be upon us.