Today (Jan. 2, 2011) was a good day for current, the weather forecast was looking reasonable and I had big plans for some big dives in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I was hoping to dive Church Island and the Bedford Islands, but when I left Becher Bay I could see the usual low swell rolling up the Strait. This wouldn't allow me to safely tie up my boat to the steep, exposed rocks. The Race Passage Current table showed only a tiny flooding current between 10:00 and 1:00, but I noticed that the current was actually ebbing (and quite strongly). The water out here also looked green and murky. -So my grand diving ambitions would have to wait for another day and I went back into Becher Bay. I tried to tie up to a few of my favorite spots here (Smyth Head, Village Islands), but the swell slowly lifted my boat up onto the rocks, leaving it stranded until the next wave. There was lots of frantic paddling and swearing and I eventually found a semi-sheltered spot to tie up to on Frazer Island (just a short swim from the South-East Islets). I swam out to the South side of the Islets and swam down the rocky reef. Visibility was only about 10-15 feet and, once past the shallows, everything was very silty. The reef went down to about 60 feet deep and was home to mostly urchins. There were some rocky areas out in the muck, where I saw a Puget Sound king crab (it wasn't moving. Maybe a moult?), 4 juvenile vermilion rockfish and a few white plumose anemones. My maximum depth here was 80 feet. Back up around 30-40 feet, there were some small canyons with clumps of plumose anemones, more urchins, zoanthids and orange colonial tunicates. There weren't many fish at all. In the shallows there was the expected Juan de Fuca colour (coraline algae, surf grass, stalked kelp, fish-eating anemones, urchins, etc.).
