I hope some of my companions will post some of their pictures- I am a horrible photographer, both above and below the water, so my strategy involves diving with photographers, and then begging them for copies of their pictures. (works for me.......)
Anyway, after leaving Seattle at 4 in the $%&^*#@ morning on Friday, we arrived at Port Hardy around 4 PM. After hooking up with our Captain/ Divemaster/ Host, John deBoeck, he informed us that there were gale force winds out on the water, so we would need to get a Hotel room for the night, because the straights were "not navigable." So, we did.
The next morning, the wind had died down, and we headed out to "The Hideaway." The Hideaway is, uh, a bit rustic.....but very comfortable and functional- there are nice beds, electricity (when the generator is running),plentiful and tasty hot meals, heat, hot water, flush toilets, and everything I need to be right at home, all floating on wooden raft/ pontoon type structures. But, if your idea of "roughing it" is a Holiday Inn off of the interstate that doesn't have HBO, this place is not for you. (Personally, I loved it......I even asked John if I could come live there for a year or so, and work off my room and board.....he said that if I could chop wood, we might be able to come to an understanding....)
So, after settling in, we geared up, and headed out for the first dive.......John R splashed before me, and immediately lost a fin.......over a wall that was, I believe, around 200 feet deep. Mav, Pez, and I went into "search and recovery" mode, to no avail- I was in a brand new drysuit, and my weighting was severely off- I was so buoyant, I couldn't get more than a few feet under before corking! I watched Pez and Mav descend into killer visibility, 50 feet or more, and return a short while later with no XXL Jetfin. (we decided later that JR must have drug his heel over the edge of the skiff doing a backroll in, and popped the springstrap off) After trying to decide what to do, I finally got back in the boat, and handed John my Turtle fins- I hear that everyone had a nice dive without me.
After a surface interval back at the hideaway, we were back on the water with an old pair of snowshoes that deBoek had found for Rawlings to dive with......actually, I think they were meant to be fins, but they were, like, 4 feet long, almost like freediver's fins! After we dropped into 40 fsw or so, JR signalled me that he was calling the dive- we did a slow ascent together, and he told me that the fins were *not* working for him, but that I should drop back down and continue the dive with the rest of the group- (I could never have done this around here, but we were relatively shallow, and the vis was so good that finding 3 open circuit divers was a piece of cake- just follow the bubbles!) But, before I got near the group, in 25 fsw, a quick check of my dive computer showed an error message I had never seen before- following my training, I did a dil flush, and surfaced in a controlled manner. Back on the skiff, I figured out that the "error message" was no big deal, and that it just wanted me to confirm a momentary low P02 reading from a dil flush on the surface.....anyway, I could have fixed it underwater with the push of a button, but I could hear all these voices in my head: "Why did he sit there screwing around with his computer? He would have lived if he had just bailed out! etc, etc..." Anyway, I was 0 for 2 at this point, on the diving, and trying hard not to get "emotional." After discussing JR's fin problem with deBoek, we decided that some modifications couldn't hurt- out came the trusty razor knife, and JD had amputated quite a bit of excess length, and JR jumped in to give them a surface test.....then JD really went to town on the new fins, and carved sort of a "Bat Signal" shape in the ends- the modified show shoe fins served JR well for the rest of the trip! (but I did notice that he grabbed my turtles when I sat one dive out because I had been up too late drinking rum with deBoek.)
The next day, determined to get a good dive in, We hit Browning Wall- Spectacular site! It's a wall that disappears into the depths, so covered with life that you can't see rocks anywhere......I had some mask- flooding issues, but overall, it was a great dive- JR tried to get me to pose next to a shelf that had 3 full grown Puget Sound King Crabs on it, but I didn't see the crabs, and thought he meant to pose next to a lump of anemone.....anyway, it didn't work out, but I felt pretty dumb when I finally saw the crabs.
Another standout dive, perhaps my favorite on the trip, was a nearby site called "The Rock of Life." The vis was easily 70-80 feet here, and the sun was at a nice overhead angle, lighting up the water to a deep, satisfying, turquoise color. Life on the wall was thick with every color imaginable, and for once, all my gear seemed to be working at the same time! JR and I dropped down to 130 fsw, and very slowly drifted with the current, enjoying the large "no decompression" limits provided by our Rebreathers, ascending quite slowly....it was a perfect dive for me, and worth the whole trip all by itself, in my opinion!
The other dive site I have to mention is Tremble Rock, aka Nakwakto Rapids. This dive is in a class all by itself, and also worth the entire trip. One of the most current-swept stretches of channel in the world, with a small island in the middle, close to nothing, in the middle of nowhere. We dove it on the largest exchange that John D will take divers there on- I forget the numbers, but currents around it can break 20 knots on a regular basis.....large logs have been seen floating past the rock, and be sucked under by the currents, only to surface hundreds of yards down stream.....
When John D told us to get in the water on the lee side of the rock, he told us to be back up in 30 minutes, no fooling around......we splashed, and dropped into what I can only describe as a psychedelic wonderland of color- gooseneck barnacles flourish here, and very few other places on earth- these things, if you've never seen one, I won't waste your time trying to describe them, except to say that they seriously look like something out of Alice in Wonderland......after just 15 minutes swimming through fairly calm water, at around 70 feet of depth, I looked up and saw Cuppie go shooting past John R, in what looked like an uncontrolled ascent.....John seemed to be reaching out to her for a second, before he was also picked up and thrown up through the water column like a rag doll in a hurricane! I was only a few feet away from them, in perfectly calm water, and couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. I started to swim up after them, when, suddenly, my feet and head exchanged positions.....several times! It was all I could do to hammer oxygen into my loop to stave off hypoxia from the ascent. I managed to grab onto a rock outcropping at around 40 fsw, and check my controls- amazingly, my loop p02 was right at 1.2- I had compensated for the ascent perfectly, and just had to adjust my buoyancy. I looked up, and there was Rawlings, clinging to a similar rock about 3 feet away from me, grinning like a maniac. We sat there laughing like idiots for a minute or so, and continued our dive- the others had apparently survived the upwelling as well, but moment by moment, we could feel the current increasing. Knowing it was time to head up, we all seemed to invent our own method of "underwater rock climbing." We all hit the surface right around 30 minutes, and saw that we had somehow come up in the middle of a class IV whitewater rapid, that was on its way to becoming class V! John D brought the boat in close to the rock, and we all pushed off and grabbed the "granny line" strung down the side of the boat- it took a while to get everyone back in, but we managed somehow......the grins, "high fives", whoops, and shouts continued for a long time afterwards- THAT was the dive of a lifetime, to be sure.
I'm still processing memories from our week up there, and I hope the others will post their own impressions, along with some pics.
If you're like me, a cold water diver who loves new sites.......you really, really, have to see this place. I would rather return here than go see the Caribbean, frankly. John deBoek discovered many of these sites himself, in his 25 years of running around the area on boats, and as has been stated in other threads on this site, he knows the currents there like I know the lines in the palm of my hand- actually, he probably knows them better. Browning Pass is really, truly, a "Must See Before You Die" place, and I don't think you could possibly do better than Browning Pass Hideaway with John deBoek. I will be back there as soon as I can.
Looking forward to pics and comments from your buds....
by Unknown
