The last time I managed a successful dive here at Christmas Point was back in 2010. I tried diving here again a few years ago in September, but there was a thick, red plankton bloom that reduced the visibility to almost nothing and blocked out all light below 10' deep. Even with my light, I bumped into the bottom below the mooring line without seeing it so I aborted the dive. I've been out in Finlayson Arm a few times over the years in September and there has often seemed to be the same red plankton bloom that made the visibility as bad as it gets. Today (Sept. 18, 2022), I decided to try for Christmas Point again, ignoring that it was another September. As I went out from the Goldstream Marina in my boat, the water looked pretty yellow, but not fully red so I kept going. The wakes from other boats looked white instead of pink so I took that as a good sign. I tied up to the shoreline at the Christmas Point dive site and swam out on the surface to the mooring buoy.
I descended down the mooring line. Visibility was pretty bad, barely 6'. I could just see my fins disappearing in the murk. It started to clear up below 30' deep. At the bottom of the mooring line about 40' deep, visibility was maybe 15', but it was already pretty dark. There were lots of plumose anemones in the area that I don't remember from years ago.
I swam quickly down the slope towards the ledge of cloud sponges that is the whole point of this dive site. Below 60' deep, visibility was great, maybe 50', but it was too dark to see anything without a light. When I reached the cloud sponge ledge (more like a long balcony that juts out from the wall), I tried to take some long exposure (5 second) pictures using a tripod to try and capture the scene in the almost total darkness. The streaks of light shining down aren't sunrays, but just from me shining my flashlight around trying to illuminate the sponges. The attempt wasn't very successful so I tried to switch my camera settings back to a more normal shutter speed, but it was so dark I couldn't see what I was doing and when I tried to shine my light on the camera housing, I just blinded myself. Because of the depth I had limited time down here so I just decided to swim around the ledge and take a bunch of photos with whatever settings I blindly set my camera to. I think the shutter speed was set for about 2 seconds so some of the photos have a blurry double image around the cloud sponges.
I soon swam back up the rocky slope to try and avoid having to do decompression stops. As I went shallower the ambient light was enough to change my camera settings so I stubbornly swam back down to the cloud sponges to quickly snap off a few random normal shutter-speed photos.
I left the cloud sponge ledge for a second time and headed back up the rock slope. I now was stuck doing a decompression stop and I didn't want to do it hanging onto the mooring line in mid-water so I followed my compass back to shore.
I'll have to come back here sooner than another 10 years on a day with better visibility and more light. This spot is a pretty dramatic dive site with the ledge of cloud sponges sticking out from the wall. This is one of only 4 sites in Saanich Inlet that I know of that has a good amount of cloud sponges. There are several other spots in the Inlet that have one or two cloud sponges, but this site, along with Senanus Island, McCurdy Point and the "Secret Spot" are the only ones I would call "sponge dives".
