I haven't been to the Saanich Inlet "Secret Spot" in 13 years. Back when I first dove it in 2005, I was asked to keep its location a secret to protect the cloud sponges from too many divers visiting them and inevitably damaging them by accident. I don't think it was a very well-kept secret since dive charters used to visit here and it's even marked on one of the online marine charts. This was always one of only 4 spots in Saanich Inlet that I would consider to be cloud sponge dives. The others are Christmas Point, McCurdy Point and the Senanus Island reef. I took my boat to the Secret Spot again for a long-overdue checkup on the sponges on July 9, 2023. I launched at the Goldstream marina and went up to the site, which is just under a kilometer South of Elbow Point/ Repulse Rock at the North end of Finlayson Arm. If it sounds like I'm not keeping it a secret anymore, I'm not (for a reason that will become clear). I tied up my boat in the tiny cove on the South side of the point that marks this site.
When I descended, I could see that the visibility was going to be great. Despite the water being full of those stringy, clumped-together plankton bits, I could probably see 30' in the shallows.
I swam down and to the right (North) towards where the sponges were. Below 40' deep, visibility was a very nice and bright 80' or so.
I reached the area with all the cloud sponges. They started at about 130' deep. I could see that they were all dead. Some of them were still intact, but were that dead, brown colour. Most of them were just broken-off stumps. This is the reason why I don't think there's a point to keeping this location secret anymore. There are no more live sponges here to protect. I went down to 150' deep (don't tell PADI) and in the good visibility I could see down to 180' deep or so, and I didn't see any live sponges. The only sign of life was a 1'-long still alive tube sticking out from a dead sponge. These sponges (there were probably about 20 of them) were located over a wide area so I doubt it was fishing gear that killed them all (this part of Finlayson Arm is a Rockfish Conservation Area so fishing is illegal anyway). I didn't see any fishing gear on the bottom around the sponges. I wonder if it was high temperatures that killed them. The Marine Life Sanctuaries Society of B.C. has done studies in Howe Sound about how cloud sponges are affected by temperature. They found that temperatures over 10 degrees start to kill the sponges. The temperatures logged at depth (hundreds of feet deep) in Saanich inlet are seasonally about 9.5 degrees which doesn't leave much room to reach fatal limits for cloud sponges. I wish I visited this site more often to see when the sponges started to die. I assume it must have been relatively recently since some of the dead sponges are still intact. I wonder if the "heat dome" record temperatures of Summer 2021 were what killed them off.
I left the dead sponges and swam back up a bit shallower. Despite the good visibility and the dramatic topography, this site seemed kind of barren. The rocks at these depths 60-100' were even more bare than usual for Saanich Inlet. Years ago, I saw several swimming anemones, but today I didn't see any.
I think without the sponges, there's no reason to dive at this particular spot anymore. The steep topography and potentially great visibility can be experienced at just about any location in the Southern half of Saanich Inlet. I still might try diving here again in a few years to see if the cloud sponges will start to grow back. It's strange that these sponge gardens are restricted to only a few locations, when the rest of the Saanich Inlet coastline has apparently identical conditions. I've been diving at lots of spots down both sides of Saanich Inlet and while I might see a single cloud sponge or two occasionally, groups of them like at the 4 (now 3) "sponge sites" are strangely rare.
