January 2005

Cod Head Reef with 49th Parallel Dive Charters.

 The continuing saga of " And who said you can't dive all year round ?"

Alexander and I did boat rock one last week so I could not resist but to return and try to dive Rock three. Tim and I set out and braved the Cold, overcast and foggy waters of stuart channel once again, but guess what "it's Canada eh. and yes it's cold water diving". 

The surprise here was finding the rock with only 20 feet of water over it !Real easy to anchor. This part of the reef has a couple of ledges and then runs down to about a 120 feet. After you hit the 60-70 foot level its a rolling slope of gravel. We only went down 90 feet and turned back to check out the reef it's self as it did not look like it was going to get interesting soon.

Heading North along the bottom of the wall we found a few fish, a lot of sea cucumber, anemones, crab etc. The interesting find was the remains of a seals lunch a pretty good sized head of a Ling Cod. Just as we were examining it, it's owner came along. When he saw us he scooted off into the distance we followed, and he soon turned around and came back to have a close look at us. Quickly bored he disappeared not to be seen again. At this point we headed up to the top of the reef in this area about 40 ft and headed back to the boat. Lots of Seastar of all variety, more Sea Cucumber, small fish and prawns. The top of the reef proved quite interesting, small valleys going down 70 + feet, fields of boulders and slab rock. Running low on air we headed up to the very top of the reef, safety stop and up to the surface. To our surprise and discomfort we must have been carried by the current cause we had a long surface swim back to the boat.

Our impression at the end of the dive was a big reef lots of places to explore but not much life, good to dive when no where else more exciting calls.

We will do perhaps a couple more dives here and will also check out boat rock 2 sometime soon, just to say we dove the area fully.