I wanted to see what the shallowest drydock looked like with decent visibility so I dove here on Jan. 15, 2017. I've only visited this drydock once before and the visibility was terrible, but I could see that it had more marine life than the deeper drydocks. As usual, today I swam out along the gravel mound that sticks out from near the rubble breakwater.
I had met a diver (Richard) on the shore who was diving here today with a rebreather and scooter. He said that he had run some guidelines to the drydocks to make them easier to find. I saw one of these lines running across the gravel mound. I didn't follow it since I didn't know if it would lead to the shallow drydock. I continued swimming out along the mound. This was about 25' deep.
I saw some cement mooring blocks next to the mound and I followed the chain from them to the drydock I was looking for.
The top of this drydock was about 25-30' deep and the base was 40-50' deep. By the way, visibility was about 40' today. The drydocks are 77' wide and I could see about half-way across. This shallower drydock has more plumose anemones than the deeper ones so far. The wood beams over the ends of this drydock are also more collapsed or missing so it's easy to see down to the pumps, valves and pipes of the system that used to flood and pump out the floating dock. There were nudibranchs everywhere, especially on the ropes.
Richard swam past with his scooter:
Once I reached the far side of the drydock, I decided to continue swimming East to try and find the rocky reef of Hospital Rock. The bottom was 60' deep here. There was scattered debris near the drydock. As I continued to swim, the bottom started to slope upwards and instead of mud, there was gravel with plumose anemones. I reached the rocky reef. It's base was about 40' deep. I didn't see any fish here.
I was running low on air so I left the rocky reef and followed my compass back towards shore. I missed the drydocks and ended up on the plumose anemone gravel mound where I started my dive.
