It was good to have the pool sessions because it took a little while to get used to the gear and took some practice to commit the necessary skills to memory. Being a former swimmer, I was comfortable underwater but taking a breath went against all of my instincts. It was easy to get used to, though, and soon enough I was gliding along the bottom of the deep end fascinated at my fish-like ability to breathe underwater.
The class culminated in four open-water dives to put our newly learned skills to the test. We did two dives a day for a weekend at Whytecliff Park in West Vancouver. Wearing a 7mm wetsuit with an additional 7mm core covering, we were immune to the cold of the Canadian Pacific ocean. Whytecliff is cool because it's a marine protected area, so there are no boats and there is a lot living down there. You'd think the cold waters of the North Pacific would be pretty barren, but it turns out they're teaming with life, you just can't see it from the surface.
In scuba lingo, "the vis was shit", but below about 30 feet we passed the halocline and it cleared up a lot. Did you know there are 3 foot wide starfish? Neither did I until this weekend. They could probably eat your face. And there were hundreds of them. Like, not just a starfish here and there, the starfish covered so much of the bottom that sometimes it was hard to even tell there was sand beneath them. In the open spaces, there were also a ton of halibut chillin' and looking goofy in the sand. And the anemones....way bigger than the ones you see in aquariums. These ones were as big as my head, at least. They could probably also eat your face. There were also some other cool animals here and there, like nudibranchs, which are neon-colored sea slugs, and there was a lion's mane jellyfish with a giant (I mean fucking huge- biggest jellyfish species in the world huge) bright orange bell and tentacles dragging five feet behind it.
Some of our dives were just to explore and others were to work on emergency skills, but they were all awesome. And at the end of the weekend I got this cool certificate, which should come in the mail as a real card soon. There doesn't seem to be a rotate photo option on this website, so here it is sideways:
Then, on Friday, I got to put my new scuba skills to use. Jess, a girl in my lab at UBC, needed help collecting crabs for an experiment. Evelyn and I volunteered to help, so we went diving at Belcarra Park which is a Dungeness crab hotspot. The dive was cool, although not that exciting. There wasn't a whole lot of life other than crabs, although there was some long eelgrass with fish swimming around in it. The crabs were cool though, some of them were tiny and others looked like they would pinch my whole hand off if I grabbed them the wrong way. We caught the crabs by finding their eyes poking out from under the sand and grabbing them from behind. Unfortunately, I didn't get to take any home for dinner that night.
It was only about 11am when we finished the dive and we had our gear rented for the whole day, so we decided it'd be a good idea to skip work and go diving again somewhere else. While everyone else (there were 5 of us collecting crabs) headed back to UBC, Evelyn and I drove up the Sea to Sky highway to Lion's Bay. There is a dive site there called Kelvin Grove. Unfortunately the only photo I have is from the parking lot, but you'll have to believe me that the scenery is amazing.
The beach was about a 5 minute walk from the parking lot, which is a lot carrying full scuba gear. From the beach you can see giant snowy glaciery mountains to the west, steep islands rising out of the water to the south, and bright blue glacial water clashing with the sea water to the north, and more giant snowy mountains to the east. There is a rock wall on the south side of the beach which is where we dove.
We swam along the gently sloping whitish sandy bottom until we reached the rock wall. The wall seemed to continue infinitely but we only got about 50 feet deep before we ran out of time. It was like going to a really incredible aquarium where you can touch things and swim with them and get as close as you want all while breathing underwater. Pretty amazing.
The upper parts of the wall were mainly covered in sunflower stars ranging in size from an inch to 3 feet, with their zillions of legs reaching all over the place and their tube feet crawling along the rock. I didn't have an underwater camera, but here's a picture I found on google of the starfish at Kelvin Grove:
As we got lower down we started seeing a lot of tube worms too- serebellids or serpulids, if I remember correctly from my marine ecology class. They are really cool, they live in tubes that they build in the rock and they filter feed with giant feather-like extremeties that fan out from the opening of the tube. When you poke them, they retract their feathers in the same way an anemone retracts its tentacles.
There were also some cool nudibranchs and chitons, and tons of awesome fish. The rock wall was filled with cracks and crevices with brightly colored striped fish hiding in the cracks and what might have been a wolf eel hiding in a crevice. Brittle stars lined the rock lower down with their thin legs snaking around small algae beds. Jellyfish propelled themselves above us, looking eerie in the dim light of the subtidal zone.
The coolest animal, in my opinion, was the sea cucumbers. I had never seen a sea cucumber before and had imagined them to be pretty boring, kind of like the vegetable. Sea cucmbers are actually way cooler than land cucumbers, though. The ones at Kelvin Grove were 3-4 feet long and covered in menacing looking spikes. They really weren't menacing though; when I poked one I realized it was soft and jello-ey, and the spikes are just for looks. They're interesting animals, because when they get agitated they shit out their guts so that predators will eat their guts and the animal itself will then go into hiding for a while until it regrows the expelled organs. Pretty smart, eh?
Here's a photo of a sea cuc at Kelvin Grove:
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