sidneypier2

I've been told before (by me) that the Sidney Pier area is the worst dive site in Canada. There are probably worse places to dive, like the lower Fraser River in Spring or maybe one of those milky glacier-fed lakes, but the Sidney waterfront is widely considered (by me) to be the worst place that's also called a "dive site" in the country. There's even a somewhat-optimistic diver sculpture on the waterfront. The last time I dove here years ago, I said I wouldn't come back unless I lived across the road and my car was out of gas and I wanted to quickly test some dive gear. I've come to realize that that attitude was unfairly negative. I now think that this site being the worst in the whole country actually makes it pretty special. So today (Dec. 17, 2023) I wanted to take some wide-angle photos of the area to have a better record of what it is like. The last times I dove here, I didn't have my 8mm fisheye lens yet and I only had a less-wide 17mm lens (in my film days) and then a 16mm fisheye (in my early digital days).

I entered down the rocks near the base of the pier. Visibility was about 8' (I could see a couple of feet past my fins). The fisheye lens always makes the visibility look much better than it was. I swam past the pilings, which were all mostly bare except for small barnacles. One of the pilings had some plumose anemones and sea stars on it. I don't know what was special about that particular piling.

I left the dock and swam South to what is known as the "ballast stone pile". This is a long pile of small boulders stretching out from shore. You can see a faint shadow of this pile in the satellite image. The idea is that it was dumped there to stabilize the base of one of the old rail or steamship docks that used to be there. I looked at old maps of Sidney and there were several of these docks over the years about 100 years ago, but none of them were in this exact spot. If I saw a boulder pile like this, I would assume that it covered an outfall pipe, but there is no sign of a pipe at it's end and there is no outfall marked on the marine chart. Anyway, last time I visited it, it was Summer so the boulders were completely covered with bottom kelp, so I couldn't see anything. Today, the boulders were exposed and I could see that they were pretty bare and lifeless. They were mostly covered with grey silt and reddish seaweed. I didn't see any fish. There was a semi-strong current flowing South, but I could swim against it.

There were a bunch of concrete reef balls dumped in the 1990's in the area around the pier to form an artificial reef. Several of them are piled next to the ballast stone reef. They were just as bare and silty as the rocks.

I kept swimming along the boulder pile. In the area where it comes close to the end of the pier, the bottom was full of old crab traps that people had dropped off the pier over the years. I saw a couple of sea pens in the sand next to the rocks and a few anemones.

From the pier I set off to try and find the ferrocement sailboat hull that I used to dive here. There have been more reef balls dumped here since I first dove the wreck and I remember that there was a line of them leading to the wreck last time I dove it. I followed a few lines of reef balls (some of them had rope guidelines running across them), but none of them led to the wreck. I followed my compass back and forth across the 20' deep bottom, even surfacing a few times to see where I was, but I couldn't find the wreck. In hindsight I was too shallow and not far out enough. The sidescan image shows the wreck a bit farther out in line with the end of the pier. I was disappointed since I think the wreck is the least-worst part of this site.

I think Sidney is missing out on a marketing opportunity. There are probably lots of adventurous divers who want to check off a bucket list of all the worst dive sites in the world. Instead of signs welcoming you to "Sidney By The Sea" (anyone looking at a map knows that Sidney is on the water), there should be one welcoming people to "Sidney By The Worst Dive Site In Canada".