As has become a tradition over the past few years, Olga and I embarked on another scuba diving expedition to the waters around Vancouver Island in British Columbia. This year's trip was to be different. Rather than an excursion to one certain area, we decided on a voyage along the east coast of Vancouver Island, visiting several diving areas over the course of six days.

We boarded the MV Mamro on the evening before its sailing. The Mamro is a 52-foot wooden craft that provides simple but satisfactory accommodations for six divers and two crewmembers. It used to be a part of the Extasea Charters fleet, but is now owned and operated by Captain Dan Ferris and his wife Debbie.

The other members of the expedition included Jeff S., Tom and Joe, all freshwater divers from the Great Lakes region and Jeff R., an accomplished underwater photographer from Seattle. All of them were very experienced coldwater divers, each with hundreds of dives in their logbooks. Except Jeff R. who dives these waters regularly, none of the others had dived in the Pacific Northwest before.

Seals and Sixgills

The first dive was at Snake Island, a great place to interact with friendly harbor seals and a nice wall dive. Olga and I love to play with the seals, so we just did a quick bounce to 70 feet over the wall to make it count as a dive and headed to the shallow channel to look for the seals. We stayed for quite a while, but saw only four of them. They did not come very close and even ignored Olga's pink fins, which they had found so irresistible on our last dive here.

Our next objective: Diving with sharks! Flora Islet near Hornby Island is one of the few sites in the world where the mysterious and elusive sixgill sharks are frequently encountered at dive-able depths. We anchored in Tribune Bay at Hornby Island and took the skiff to Flora Islet. At Flora, there was a group of research divers from the Vancouver Aquarium. They said they had not seen any sharks that day, which did not sound promising for our adventure.

We jumped in, submerged and slowly dove along the rock wall. It was a nice site even without the sharks. We saw a ratfish, a humongous lingcod, a lion's mane jellyfish, and observed a shy female wolf eel in her den. We almost gave up hope of seeing the sharks, when suddenly I spotted a large shadow below me moving in the opposite direction. A sixgill shark! We were afraid that he would bolt if we got too close, so we followed slightly behind and above him. He was a beautiful creature. Ten feet long and robustly built, he moved gracefully along the ledge at about 90 feet. He let us swim with him for a few minutes, then flipped his tail, dove straight down along the wall and disappeared into the darkness.

Next morning we went back to Flora, but no luck. There were no more sharks, so we pulled anchor and headed north. The next dive was planned on the wreck of the HMCS Columbia.

The HMCS Columbia

We arrived at Quadra Island in the late afternoon and anchored almost on top of the wreck. HMCS Columbia is a 366-foot destroyer sunk here in 1996 to form an artificial reef.

It was almost dark when we reached the main deck of the wreck. We wanted to continue down, but there was so much updraft over the side of the ship that we could not make ourselves negative enough to descend. I turned down headfirst and got a few feet below the main deck, but as soon as I stopped swimming like crazy, the current would spit me back to the main deck. The visibility was not great, it felt like a night dive and with the weird currents, it was pretty creepy. There was significantly more life here than on its sister wreck, the HMCS Saskatchewan, a couple of compartments were filled with white plumose anemones and feather stars, and scallops were everywhere.

Back on the boat, our Great Lakes wreck experts were impressed with the wreck and difficulty of the dive. However, their biggest wish was to see a wolf eel and a giant Pacific octopus. We kept promising that both are guaranteed in Port Hardy.

Next morning we breezed through Seymour Narrows while having breakfast and for the rest of the morning we dodged fishing boats with their gillnets spread like spider webs across the strait. At noon we anchored at the Broken Islands group to do an exploratory dive at a site we named Broken Islet. The visibility was at least 60 feet and the site had a very clean, pristine feel. There were schools of rockfish, lingcods, greenlings everywhere, and large red sea urchins and several species of nudibranchs on the rocks. The biggest surprise was the number of ratfish. We saw at least twenty of them during this dive, some as shallow as 15 feet. And in the middle of the day - it was unprecedented! This was the prettiest dive so far on this trip, the shark notwithstanding.

Browning Passage

Next day we headed to Browning Passage. This was to be Jeff S. and Tom's last day and they had not yet seen an octopus or a wolf eel, so the pressure was mounting. On top of it, there was a gale warning for Goletas Channel.

First, we dove Browning Wall, a real Port Hardy classic. We saw an absolute monster lingcod and multitudes of other life. But the water was bloody freezing!

The next dive was at Hussar Point, only a few hundred yards south of Browning Wall. There is a rock rib protruding into Browning Passage creating a nice wall. The wall has less life on it than Browning, but is equally interesting.

The last dive of the day was at Seven Tree Island at the north end of Browning Passage. It is a varied underwater habitat with a sheer wall, rock ledges and a shallow kelp forest. There seemed to be a red Irish lord on the wall every two feet. Large schools of yellowtail and black rockfish hovered behind us in the open water. Olga and I found a huge Puget Sound king crab and tried to round up the others to come and look. We found only Joe, so we brought him over and pointed at the crab. The crab was so well camouflaged that Joe did not immediately recognize him. Then the reef moved!

We found another king crab, several basket stars, a great sculpin and many beautiful sponges. This was a great dive. So great, in fact, that we forgot how cold the water was and stayed down there too long. When we got in the skiff, Olga was completely frozen. Her lips were dark blue.

"Doing It Right?"

Sadly, Olga woke up with a sore throat and decided to skip diving for the day. It was unfortunate, because the two dives today, Hunt Rock and the wreck of the SS Themis are our favorite sites in the area. I could not miss these and decided to break the tradition and go dive with Joe. For the first time in over two hundred dives, I dived without Olga as my buddy.

We moved Olga's argon to Joe's rig. The guys made some skeptical remarks about our DIR setup. They thought that having the long primary hose is not worth the trouble and asked if we had ever gotten into a situation where we needed it. In my zeal to promote DIR, I blurted, "Oh, Olga often breathes from my long hose!" Even before I finished my sentence, I knew I was in trouble. They did eventually calm down, but I think they got a completely wrong idea of what 'Doing It Right' applies to.

We anchored in Clam Cove, a well-protected anchorage at Nigei Island and took the skiff to Hunt Rock. Hunt Rock must be one of the top ten sites in the world. It is a couple of underwater pinnacles separated by a cleft in the middle of Gordon Channel. At the bottom of the cleft, there are a couple of dens always occupied by friendly wolf eels.

We arrived at the site before slack and waited for the bull kelp floats to pop to the surface. When they did, we rolled in. Joe and I immediately headed for the wolf eel dens, but Jeff beat us to it. When we arrived, he was already playing with a large male wolf eel. We joined him and Joe got great footage of the eel playing with us. The eel was friendly, readily came out of his den, and let us pet him with our bare (and frozen) hands, but he really was only after the handouts. I have met wolf eels here before that seemed genuinely interested in diver companionship even without the feeding. They would turn on their backs and wiggle like dogs begging to get their bellies scratched.

We spent most of the dive at the den, then took a short tour of the site and returned to the kelp 'ascent lines' for the safety stop and to surface. Joe was thrilled to see the eel, but he still had not seen an octopus. The next dive was the wreck of the SS Themis, a wooden cargo ship that sunk a hundred years ago. We saw a huge octopus there last year and I thought I remembered where the den was. Maybe we would be lucky.

The SS Themis

The wreck is quite broken up, just a pile of pieces of wood and some metal remain. There is a lot of life on and around it. However, we were looking for only one species, the elusive octopus. I immediately rushed to the place, where I remembered the octopus den. Joe followed, but it was not meant to be. So we just slowly continued our dive around the wreck. I stopped for a moment and when I looked up, I noticed Joe pointing his camera at something, shooting away. There was a little weird looking fish with a piggy snout, crawling around on his pectoral fins. Joe kept shooting the video, but looked at me and I could see the question in his eyes: "What the hell is this?" I wrote "grunt sculpin" on my slate and showed it to him. Not quite the octopus he hoped for, but a lucky find anyway.

Olga felt better in the morning, so we went for the last dive of the trip. The original plan was to go to Dillon Rock for the last chance to remedy our octopus fiasco, but the weather forecast for Goletas Channel was still bad and we ended up doing another dive at Browning Wall. It was slightly off slack, which made it a fun flyby. The monster lingcod was still there, sitting on her ledge.

We returned to Port Hardy marina, packed up the gear, said our goodbyes and loaded everything into the truck. We stayed in Nanaimo overnight, took the ferry to the mainland next morning, then across the border and home to Oregon. Another wonderful dive trip! We are looking forward to dive the beautiful Vancouver Island soon again.