About 450 meters South of the popular Maple Bay government dock reef dive site, a sidescan image shows a large rocky reef sticking out from shore. This reef ends over 130' deep according to the marine chart. The sidescan image doesn't show the area closer to shore, but the contour lines of the marine chart looked pretty irregular which made me think that the slope was rocky instead of a regular sandy slope. There was no shore access immediately near this area, but there was a public access stairway to the beach about 250 meters North at the end of Redcap St.
I dove here on Sept. 19, 2020. In hindsight, it probably would have been easier to park at the government dock parking lot (which is right by the water) and walk an extra 100 meters along the beach instead of dealing with the stairs at the end of Redcap St. Anyway, the stairs weren't that bad. I then walked about 200 meters South along the beach to where I estimated the chart showed that irregular steep, deep slope.
I swam sort-of straight out from the rocky beach hoping to come across a rocky slope. The bottom was actually all sand and small broken rock. I went down to 60' deep and started swimming South towards where the sidescan showed the large rocky area. The visibility was quite good (about 40') but I couldn't see any solid rock structure. There were a few plumose anemones (mostly orange) on the sand.
After swimming along at that 60' depth for about 10 minutes, I finally saw some rocky areas starting about 70' deep. They were pretty small (maybe 10-20' across) and separated from each other by narrow sandy areas. The rocks had lots of feather stars and some plumose anemones on them. There was a surprising current that seemed to be flowing down the slope. Many of the feather stars and anemones were leaning over in the flow. There were quite a few rockfish (almost all of them were copper, and I saw one brown and one yellowtail). By the way, Maple Bay is a Rockfish Conservation Area so killing them is illegal. I followed these reefs down to 100' deep where I stopped. I assume the reefs continue deeper, but it was dark down here so I couldn't see very far.
I swam back up the slope. Above 70' deep, there was just the gentle slope of sand/small broken rock. On the way back, I swam mostly 20-30' deep to see if there were any rocky areas at this shallower depth, but there weren't.
Considering the distance I swam to reach these deeper reefs, I think I probably reached the rocky area (at least part of it) shown on the sidescan image. Personally I think the effort required to reach it will prevent me from diving here again. It would probably be a more reasonable place to explore for someone with a scooter and more air on their back than I have.
