After a weekend of diving from a boat off the Port Hardy area, I came here (Sept. 23, 2024) for a morning shore dive before braving the long drive back to Victoria. Since there is very little road access to the water on Northern Vancouver Island, this is considered to be one of the only shore dives in the area. In Bear Cove there's a small park with a boat ramp, docks, portable toilets and lots of parking. This park is just before the ferry terminaI to Prince Rupert. I took a bunch of photos of the area on the surface, but that memory card was corrupted so all those photos were lost. I entered the water from the boat ramp and swam out along the rubble breakwater. There was a 1-2' deep surface layer of dark tannic freshwater from a nearby stream. Below that it cleared up. For most of the dive, visibility was about 40'.
There was a school of small black rockfish under the dock.
At the tip of the rubble breakwater the natural solid-rock bottom dropped down to sand about 30' deep. There were a few fish-eating and white-spotted rose anemones on the rock, but apart from some blades of bottom kelp, the rocks seemed pretty bare. They were mostly covered with small, white barnacles.
The sidescan image shows a few different areas of rocky reefs in the bay. I followed my compass out across the sand towards a long rocky area that dropped down deeper than the area near shore. After a short swim, the reef popped up in the distance.
This rocky area was about 50' deep. The rocks still seemed bare from a distance, but up close there were some zoanthids, cup corals, tunicates and some kind of feathery hydroids. There weren't lots of fish, but I saw a few copper, quillback and vermilion rockfish. There were some big concrete anchors for, I'm assuming, the floating breakwaters.
I was swimming along the South side of the reef. It had gradually become deeper. I was at about 80' deep when I looked down over the edge of a wall and saw a school of yellowtail rockfish below me. I dropped down the wall and it bottomed out at 120' deep. Among the boulders there were lots of rockfish, including a tiger and some vermilion. For some reason the visibility had dropped down here so it was pretty dark with lots of particles floating around.
I swam back up to the top of the reefs about 50' deep.
I swam back across the sandy gap to the rocky reef near the boat ramp.
The floating breakwaters above me were covered with feather duster worms and small, white plumose anemones. The breakwater was blocking the flow of the tannic fresh water layer so when I looked up, one side of the breakwater had yellow water and the other side was clear.
I think this was an ok dive as far as shore dives go. It sort of reminded me of the Northern part of Saanich Inlet (Deep Cove/Setchel Point/Moses Point/etc.). Obviously you don't want to come all the way to Port Hardy just to dive here since compared to the sites in Browning Pass, Bear Cove is absolutely terrible. For me, it was a good way to spend an hour before driving back to Victoria. It's probably worth doing again to explore some more of the many reefs in the area.
