Since I usually get distracted by all the stuff inside the bay, this time (Nov. 3, 2008) I put on blinders and forced myself to swim out to Daphne Islet. I wanted to see what it was like around the West side of the island, where the chart shows it's at it's steepest and deepest. Visibility was only around 20 feet, which I found surprisingly low for this time of year. The water was full of that familiar white, stringy plankton and the clouds of moon jellyfish were back. The islet was a steep drop of rock down to about 80 feet, where a flat, silty slope took over. The rocky walls were mostly bare except for some seastars and lots of silt. I was surprised by the amount of rockfish though. I was often surrounded by schools of small (8-10") black rockfish. The cracks between the rocks often hid a brown rockfish and I even saw a few small pacific cod-looking fish. They were unafraid and swam straight at me. It seemed like they were attracted by my light. Unfortunately, I had the same camera strobe issues that I had on my last dive (it seems that the sync cord was leaking and it shorted out the leads). It quit halfway through the dive so I had to finish off with more natural-light photos.
