descansopoint

I was looking for a shore-accessible, reasonably steep-and-deep dive on Gabriola Island that I hadn't been to yet. The marine chart shows a plummeting drop to over 150' deep along the outside of the Western Point of Descanso Bay (where the ferry terminal is located). The zoning map shows a public right-of-way at the tip of the point (near a navigational light). This right-of-way is at the end of Easthom Rd. When I've seen this point from the ferry before, it seemed to be too steep to walk down, but I thought I'd go look anyway. This was on Aug. 12, 2017.

When I arrived at the public right-of-way at the end of Easthom Rd., I could see that the access wasn't really do-able for sane divers. I scrambled down the steep slope through the branches and brush anyway just to convince myself that I wouldn't want to do it while wearing dive gear. A bit farther back up the road there was a lane (Descanso Bay Rd.) that ended at a small beach in the bay about 300 meters from the point. I parked there instead right near the water and decided to enter the water there. I was able to walk out along the rocky shoreline about halfway (before the rocks were too steep) and then I snorkeled the rest of the way to the point. It was high tide when I walked out. At low tide it might be possible to walk out farther towards the point.

I descended at the point. The bottom was a slope of sandstone boulders that ended in a sandy ledge about 40' deep. I could see the bottom drop off in a wall at the edge of this ledge.

I swam down the wall. By now the visibility was around 50'. The wall near the point seemed strangely covered in white sand. I didn't see much marine life on the wall here. It was pretty bare except for that sand. I went down to about 100' deep and I could see the wall falling straight down out of sight. According to the chart, the bottom is about 150' deep.

As I swam farther along the wall, the marine life increased a bit. There were feather stars, zoanthids, a tiger rockfish, a juvenile yelloweye rockfish and a couple of plumose anemones. I saw a dogfish shark 50' above me at the top of the wall.

I swam back up to the sandy ledge at the top of the wall (40' deep). I saw another shallow wall dropping from the surface to 30' deep. It's overhanging surface was covered with small plumose anemones. The visibility was again only about 15' up here. I only managed to take one wide-angle photo of this shallow wall before my camera strobe battery died.