Quadra Island Adventures!
Posted: Wed Jun 27, 2018 10:53 pm
Howdy Folks!
Last weekend ScubaJess, SphnMartin, vjw and I went to celebrate vjw's birthday diving around Quadra Island!
What a great trip! I've never dove the area before. Honestly didn't know much about it other than I heard lots of Strawberry Anemones and it's supposed to be pretty good. Quadra is located outside Campbell River, a city about halfway up the east side of Vancouver Island,. There definitely were a lot of strawberry anemones, along with a lot of cool sponges (tennis ball sponges, nipple sponges, stalked vase sponges, etc), greenlings, tube worms, snakelocks, nudibranchs, octos, wolfeels, bait ball fish, lots of sea stars (including adult sunflowers
), urchins (gazillions), some kelp and lots and lots of current!
We booked via Abyssal Charters. It was an all-inclusive package that included a hotel stay, 6 dives, and meals. The accommodations were pleasant, the captain was super nice and knowledgeable. Viz was medium, probably a dark 20 feet below the 30' depth. Good times!
This was some challenging diving... We probably didn't hit the best tides possible but it is in general very fast out there... The main channel gets faster than deception pass... The slack tide windows were extremely short, and once they were over if you insist on >60 min dives like I do they'd blast you down the reef if you didn't find a good hiding spot. One of our dives, a back eddy dive at Copper Cliff, looked like a river before we got in. It was a fun challenge trying to take photos of an octo when the current was blasting away so hard even the rocks I was holding on to started tumbling upon my grip. At the end of one dive (Steep Island), I think I zoomed along the wall faster than I've ever been in a drift dive before. Some ups and downs and back eddy fights along the way. Quite the rush.
Here were some of the snaps along with a few more comments!
What a great trip, I definitely want to go back and explore this area some more!
Last weekend ScubaJess, SphnMartin, vjw and I went to celebrate vjw's birthday diving around Quadra Island!
What a great trip! I've never dove the area before. Honestly didn't know much about it other than I heard lots of Strawberry Anemones and it's supposed to be pretty good. Quadra is located outside Campbell River, a city about halfway up the east side of Vancouver Island,. There definitely were a lot of strawberry anemones, along with a lot of cool sponges (tennis ball sponges, nipple sponges, stalked vase sponges, etc), greenlings, tube worms, snakelocks, nudibranchs, octos, wolfeels, bait ball fish, lots of sea stars (including adult sunflowers
), urchins (gazillions), some kelp and lots and lots of current! We booked via Abyssal Charters. It was an all-inclusive package that included a hotel stay, 6 dives, and meals. The accommodations were pleasant, the captain was super nice and knowledgeable. Viz was medium, probably a dark 20 feet below the 30' depth. Good times!
This was some challenging diving... We probably didn't hit the best tides possible but it is in general very fast out there... The main channel gets faster than deception pass... The slack tide windows were extremely short, and once they were over if you insist on >60 min dives like I do they'd blast you down the reef if you didn't find a good hiding spot. One of our dives, a back eddy dive at Copper Cliff, looked like a river before we got in. It was a fun challenge trying to take photos of an octo when the current was blasting away so hard even the rocks I was holding on to started tumbling upon my grip. At the end of one dive (Steep Island), I think I zoomed along the wall faster than I've ever been in a drift dive before. Some ups and downs and back eddy fights along the way. Quite the rush.
Here were some of the snaps along with a few more comments!
- Scuba Jess, exploring the crazy colored reefs at the "Row and be damned" dive site
- A wolfeel residing in a colorful home
- Steep Island had an amazing colony of Tube Worms. A sight quite unlike any I've seen before!
- Moon Jellies and bait fish
- A tube worm cluster
- The hard-to-catch octo I was mentioning
- Nipple and tennis ball sponges on a carpet of strawberry anemones
- Adult sunflower stars :)
- Leather stars
- Lion's Maine jelly
and plastered with life and the dive boat marina had excellent coffee shop with delicious hot dogs! Also our captain BBQed Burgers 
for us & got us coffee & ice cream! What a cool guy! 
