This site is a tiny, exposed rock just offshore from the large trailer park between Sooke and Otter Point on West Coast Road. The marine chart shows a shallow area (30' deep) sticking out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca from the islets. The tip of this area eventually reaches a depth of 60-100 feet. The trailer park has a boat launch ramp facing the islet, but it's private and the public is not allowed to access the beach from trailer park property. Just before the trailer park, there's a public access lane on the zoning map between the park and house # 7863. The gravel lane looks like a driveway. At the end of the lane, there's a short mossy area leading to the pebble beach. From here, it's a 250-meter surface swim out to the islet. There's another, shorter public access lane just past the trailer park between houses 7921 and 7947, but it isn't cleared and you'd have to force your way through a wall of thorn bushes. I came to the beach at the end of the gravel lane a couple of times, but the wind was too strong to consider a surface swim. Finally there was a break between the gale warnings (Jan. 5, 2011) so I drove out here for a dive. I was tempted to drive down the access lane to drop off my gear and save myself a walk, but I ended up just parking up on the road next to some mailboxes and gearing up there. The lane isn't that long (about the same as the trail to Willis Point). The swim out on the surface seemed to take longer than it should. I'm pretty sure I was swimming against a current (even though I was diving on the Race Passage slack). I descended in the kelp next to the islet. I didn't feel any current here. Visibility was only 10-15 feet. The sloping rocky reef was covered with stalked kelp. Looking up close, I could see patches of staghorn bryozoans, hedgehog hydroids, cup corals, orange colonial tunicates, etc. It was pretty colourful. I saw a few tiny Puget Sound king crabs, fish-eating anemones, dorid-type nudibranchs and several keyhole limpets. On the side of the islet facing the Straits, there was a narrow canyon about 15 feet deep with patches of hydrocorals on it's sides. A tiny Irish Lord was sitting next to a patch of yellow sulphur sponge. I swam out along the West side of the reef and there was a small wall going down to about 30 feet deep. There were some plumose anemones, urchins and lobed tunicate colonies here. The wall turned into a sloping reef that ended in sand about 55 feet deep. There might have been more reefs out farther, but with the poor visibility I couldn't see much so I went back up to the colourful shallower area (10-30 feet deep). I saw a few small black and copper rockfish hiding in cracks, kelp greenlings and a medium-sized lingcod, but it wasn't really a "fish" kind of dive. I saw some strands of macrocystis "giant" kelp. Near the surface, the rocks were covered with barnacles and large mussels. I was surprised to not see any green anemones. In the channel between the islet and the trailer park, the current was pretty strong. It was going in the right direction so I rode it back to my entry-point. This swim seemed much shorter than the swim out. Despite the downsides of the surface swim, the bad visibility and the potential for current, I was impressed by the colourful invertebrates around the islet.
