I was recently at the historical museum in Lake Cowichan looking for information on the site of the old Honeymoon Bay mill (where I had just been diving). They showed me an old plan of the area and I noticed that there were some structures shown in the small bay a bit to the West of the mill site. A bit more research told me that this bay was the site of a log dump, where trains and trucks would dump their load of logs so they could be floated away to a mill to be turned into lumber. The map showed two dock-like structures (the dumps) and some floating structures that the museum attendant said were floathomes. According to pictures in the museum, this dump was older than the nearby Honeymoon Bay mill by at least a few decades (the pictures were from the 1920's). I drove around the edge of the bay and could only find one way to easily access the shore. This was at the eastern point of the bay at Lilly Beach Park. The map said this was once the location of the "Oriental camp site" (Chinese and Japanese workers were segregated back then). I came here for a dive the next week (May 17, 2014). I realised that I had forgotten my camera strobe mounting arm at home so I had to quickly make one from a hacksaw handle and hoseclamps. It wasn't really long enough so that's why there's a white glare in the upper right corner of some of the photos. The park had a large gravel parking lot at the end of Beach Drive and a forest trail running next to a stream. This ended at a gravel beach. I swam out and turned left around the corner into the bay. There was a steep slope covered with aquatic plants (I keep wanting to call them "seaweed") going down to about 20 feet deep. Then there was a more gentle silty slope. I followed it out to about 40 feet deep where there seemed to be small dune-like hills and valleys stretching out into the bay. Visibility was around 40-50 feet, which is the best I've seen in the lake so far. I swam along the base of the slope and could see logs and trees scattered around. I saw some small volcano-like holes in the silt with water flowing out. There wasn't any domestic junk (dishes, bottles, etc.) that I would expect under floathomes, but there were lots of tires and rusted metal drums. I reached the first log dump dock (for trucks?). It was a bunch of broken-off pilings along the shore in the shallows. The shoreline was now forested-over. There was a large 20'-deep plain of plants out in front of it. I continued to swim in the shallows towards the rail dock. So far I hadn't seen any fish, but here there were groups of small, 4"-long trout. Above water, all that remained of the rail dock were more broken-off pilings. Underwater, there were scattered wooden beams and big rusty metal u-shaped things. I swam to where the dock used to stick out into the bay and found the train rails lying on the bottom attached to large wooden beams. I assume these rails used to be above water on pilings. There were also more metal beams (more rails?) laid out on top. Out past the tip of this dock I saw an orange cloud over the bottom which dropped visibility to almost nothing. I didn't want to swim too far into it. I wondered if there's an outfall pipe from shore here. I had used well over half my air and was about 1/2 kilometer from where I started. To save air I swam part of the way back across the bay on the surface. I could clearly see the bottom over 20' below and there were just more logs and trees. I used the rest of my air swimming in the shallows under the floating docks (from the more modern houses on shore). I didn't see any old junk from the logging days, but there were forest-like fields of aquatic plants that were about 4-5' high.
