This time I wanted to see what was down the slope here if I turned right when swimming out of the bay (last time I turned left). It was a grey, foggy day on the surface (March 9, 2015). I made sure to check the Nanaimo tide table and showed up when it showed an 11 foot tide. This was more than enough to fill the shallow bay and allow me to swim out on the surface. Visibility in the bay was much less than last time. I could see about 6-8', which was tropical compared to what I found outside the bay. Here, the water was a yellow-brown soup. I couldn't see my hand when I stretched it out. Sometimes you hear reports of visibility so bad that you couldn't see the light from your dive light when you press it against your mask. That of course is nonsense (unless you forgot to turn the light on). The visibility today was about 2 feet, which is realistically about as bad as it gets. I kept bumping into boulders and the bottom because I couldn't see them. I pretty much felt my way out by hand. This layer of plankton continued down to about 30' deep and then the water started to clear. Despite it being late morning, it was completely dark down here and I could only see a faint brown glow if I looked straight up. Below 50 feet deep, the visibility seemed pretty good (maybe 40'), but I could only see what was in the beam of my light. The slope here was made of small broken rocks covered with burrowing cucumbers. This became sandier at the bottom of the slope (90' deep). There were more of those tiny cloud sponges, crimson anemones and small boot sponges. I didn't see any large rock areas or walls, but in the darkness, there may have been some just out of the beam of my light. I turned left (more or less North) towards the wall I dove last time. There was another wall/sloping rocky reef just before it with a sandy gap in-between. There were a few boot sponges and crimson anemones on the reef. I didn't spend as much time as I would have liked down here since I didn't want to have to do any decompression up in the blind murk waiting for surprise sealions to slam into me. I started the swim back up the slope, but when I entered the bad visibility layer, I kept bumping into the uneven bottom since I couldn't see it. I became frustrated and a bit spooked so I ascended straight up and swam back to the bay on the surface.
I'll still think I'll have to have another look at the area out to the right of the bay when the visibility is better.
