It has been a little quiet around these part lately, so i thought i would share our recent adventure out at lighthouse park.

From what i had read Lighthouse park had some of the best diving from shore in the Howe sound, but i had never met anyone who had actually dived there. The reason for the lack of divers with any experience diving at Lighthouse park is clear. There are numerous complicated logistics to deal with, such as 1.5 km walk through woodland trails and if you wish to dive there it must be at slack tide as currents can become for the lack of a better word hardcore.

The dive team consisted of Evan Soukas, Myself and the most recent addition to the BC GUE/DIR community Anton North. We all met at the the Park parking lot for 10:30, slack tide was at 13:35 this gave us plenty of time to make our way down to the water, gear up and go through our pre-dive checks. It also gave me some time to shoot some photos and to give Evan a hard time about forgetting how to put a single tank rig together ;-) We chose single tanks obviously because of the long hike down to the water, but now that i have done it in a single tank and realize that its not that bad I would feel fine hauling doubles down there as well. We had anticipated the hike to take much longer, as Betty Pratt called for an hour to make your way from the parking lot to the water in her book 131 Dives. We managed this in 12 minutes with the help of our trusty hand trucks. Once we made it as far as the carts could tolerate, which conveniently enough is what looks like some type of summer camp complete with benches to don your gear we threw the gear on our back with the assistance of the lovely picnic tables and hiked down the skinny, but groomed trail to the waters edge. Total time from parking lot including gearing up was roughly one hour.

 Anton with the beastly carts

We entered at East Beach, went through our final checks and sank into the emerald sea, or more like the brown sea for us Howe sound divers. Anton led the main portion of the dive, i took number two position, and Evan sat in the rocking chair position with the crab bag. The plan was to head out perpendicular to shore which ended up being almost bang on south. We would keep this heading until we hit 21m, then head east until one of us hit our turn pressure. Since we had never dove here, and only had kind of an idea of what the topography was like it changed the lay out of our dive, so instead of a nice out, back and up profile it kind of ended up as a bastardized triangle, but we got to see more of the topography this way. I did see a wall that struck my interest and i will be back to explore that a little further shortly. From what i remember it was roughly south east off shore around 21m. As for marine life, we did not see anything too wild, but there were some quality items such as grunt sculpins, a massive amounts of giant acorn barnacles as well as a couple golf ball crabs. In fairness to the marine life the main objective was to cover ground and get a feel for the site, and not so much hunt out critters.

Small trail to the waters edge.

All in all very glad to have checked out a new site, and we definitely be back soon to check out that wall, and who knows what we will find!!!

AJ