On the chart, this is a shallow reef near the entrance to Saanich Inlet that drops off on the West side. There is a navigational marker and a beat-up mooring buoy on the surface. We came here in mid-November, 2005 to have a look. We tied up to the buoy and swam down to the North-West side of the marker. The bottom was a mostly-flat (for Saanich Inlet) rocky reef with white crushed-shell sand patches here and there. Visibility was 30-40 feet. In the shallows, everything looked white, because even the rocks were covered with tiny white barnacles. We swam for quite a distance and finally made it down to around 60 feet deep. The rocks seemed mostly bare here too except for a few isolated areas where there were clusters of plumose anemones, zoanthids, rockfish (quillback, brown, copper), etc. Because of it's location, Wain Rock is something of a transition zone between Saanich Inlet and the southern Gulf Islands. There were way more cup corals here than at other inlet dives. I was also surprised to see rocks coated with orange colonial tunicates and even some unhealthy-looking staghorn bryozoans. This must be a popular fishing spot because I saw 4 big lead "cannon balls". Most references to Wain Rock on the internet seem to do with octopus encounters, but we didn't see any occupied dens. There were a lot of crab bits around though. This place seems deceiving on a chart because you'd expect it to drop off quickly, but the shallow reef seems to go on forever. Maybe we just missed the dropoff. We finally surfaced way off the North-West side of the marker from water 30 feet deep. I'd definitely like to do more exploring here, but next time we'll use a depth sounder to find the deeper areas.
