I came back on March 23, 2008 hoping for the decent visibility I had last time at the same time of year. Unfortunately, it was only 6-10 feet. Under the dock, I didn't see any of the giant nudibranchs that I saw last time. There were just a few sea lemons. I did see bones all over the place (I'm assuming from someone's dinner on a boat above) and a pile of prawn heads. A bunch of tiny sculpins were poking around them and some small dungeness crabs were dragging some away. I had a look at the bottle field, hoping to take some close-up photos of the warbonnets, gunnels and ruby octopus that are usually found in bottles, but this bottle patch seemed vacant. I followed my compass out to the reef. There were several small copper rockfish along the wall and a tiny (1-foot-long) lingcod guarding an egg mass tried to chase me away. I noticed several tiny feather stars that I didn't notice last time. There also seemed to be more of those small orange finger sponges. At the end of the reef (60 feet deep), the visibility seemed to be a bit better (15 feet). I saw a large ship's anchor and chain attached to a rope going up to the surface (I didn't see a buoy from shore). The anchor was around 8 feet long. There were small colonies of yellow sponge, sculpins, leopard nudibranchs and burrowing cucumbers on the rope. On top of the mostly-flat reef there were several mating pairs of small, tanner-like crabs. On my swim back to shore I saw a guide rope held down by concrete blocks leading back to shore. It seemed to lead off to the left side (when looking out from shore) of the dock, so I didn't follow it, but finished my dive under the dock taking photos of clam siphons in the shallows. When the visibility is good, this can be a bright, cheerful dive, but on a day like today it's rather gloomy -Sort of like a shallow dive in Saanich Inlet when the visibility is bad.
