I took a break from diving the day before (i.e. plans fell through). It’s good to have a day to get caught up in real life stuff however.
Not to worry, C.Lock and I wanted to do a 21/35 dive. We departed towards our destination of MacKenzie Bight in the nice change of weather that we’ve had lately … rain and warm winds.
Wind.
Let me say that again.
WIND.
Not wind, but wind.
While driving over to MacKenzie, looking out onto the inlet, one could see white caps.
Yup, whitecaps in the inlet.
Looking down at the ‘beach’ where you enter the water at MacKenzie was a sight to behold. One of a washing machine at high tide. Not fun to hang out for 16 minutes, let alone getting in and out of it!
So we decided to try our luck up at Willis on the other side of the point. Thankfully, the winds were a bit southern in their western direction, and Willis was spared the white caps, and excessive current.
We dropped our deco bottles down below, geared up, edged out and swam towards the buoy. Experienced some surface current.
Dropped down, bubble checked, and headed to our destination of 42m (140ft) to the bottom of the rock. We left a backup light on one of the boulders at 44m (very high tide), and headed to the left. Spent a few minutes slowly kicking and checking under all the rocks and boulders for critters. Reached the end of the wall and turned back.
Saw a very sizeable Vermillion Rockfish near the end of the wall, along with many (empty shelled) crabs, large Cod and other critters. No Octo’s sadly, however, some various nudibranchs.
We came back to the boulder, and started to head up for our Deco. There was some very ‘regional’ current at some of the stops on the way up. Nothing too bad at all. The water wasn’t too cold for the 28 minutes that we did. However, I would have really liked to have a working battery for my heated suit.
We slowly finned our way back to shore through the chilly shallows and popped up right at the entry. After climbing up the slippery rocks, we brought all our gear up to the vehicles and then foraged out for some refreshments and wings, and dropped tanks off for saturdays trimix/deco fills …….
Bottom Time: 26minutes
Deco: 23 minutes
Run Time: 61 minutes