Egmont, BC on the Sunshine Coast!!!

Hello all,

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!
I wanted to post a quick report about our diving day today up on the Sunshine Coast here in BC. Our specific location was Egmont, which is about a 50 minute drive north of Sechelt and we were excited to dive in the area of Agamemnon Channel.

There were 14 divers in total heading up there to meet Kal ('former' Porpoise Bay Charters) as they have now moved their diving resort up to this area and are no longer running out of Sechelt. Kal's new place is absolutely awesome and the service is top-notch as usual :)
They are now Strong Water Retreat: www.porpoisebaycharters.com
The staff of Eric and Andrea were extremely helpful the entire time we were there.

Over the last couple of days, I had spent quite alot of time blending gas for today's dives and this morning's 5:00am alarm wake-up call could not come soon enough as the group was very excited to go on this day trip for quite some time.

The group met at Ocean Quest in Burnaby to analyze gas, and fill vehicles with many sets of dive gear. We were away from there shortly there-after and after the first Starbuck's run of the day, we were on the ferry toward Sechelt. As stated above we had 13 divers on this charter, some who had been there before and some had not. We are a mixed bag of divers and they had all types of training and experience and we had different dives planned for the day....some were diving recreational and most were diving technical.

Egmont is about 1.5 hours drive from the ferry terminal once you get over to the Sunshine Coast so after a second stop at Starbuck's when passing through Sechelt, we were on our way up and we arrived in Egmont at around 10:00am.

We started to load all the gear onto the boat and by the time all was said and done, we were on our way to or first dive "The Powerlines" by 11:00am. So very excited!!!
For those of you who do not know this site, it is AWESOME....
A sheer wall with crystal clear visibility loaded with tons of life including GIGANTIC healthy cloud sponges (some the size of vehicles) and Gargonian Fan Coral all over the wall. Soooo....you can understand why this dive is so popular....

We started to gear up.....the normal protocol is to have the tech divers get in first as total runtimes today were at around 80+ minutes in water time. My team consisted of myself along with BlairP and ChrisB and we had a max plan of 200' and another team of MarkD and BrandonH maxing at 170'. There was also another team of KathrynK, BlaineF, and DarrenW maxing at 150'. The rest of the group consisted of GaryF, ColinS, EricC, KevinH, AndreaF and EricS and they were diving recreational dives. This site is great for both rec and tech divers alike as the wall is just beautiful!

The three teams of tech divers were descending first in the abyss :) The viz was crystal clear all the way from the surface to depth! We had ambient light down to the 150' range and the wall was just stunning with cloud sponges and bright red fan coral all over the wall. The was truly amazing. To be able to look up from depth and see the entire wall with divers all around so clear was something we just don't get at Whytecliff Park ;) and I wasn't missing it ;)

As usual, our BT had to come up at some point so up to deco we went after completing our deep stops. We staggered our descent a little to make sure we were not all at the same deco bumping into the other teams doing deco.
It was a long deco but it did not seem like it as there was always tons to look at and take in the viz. Truly something we are not used to down in Vancouver :)

The wall seemed to current going back and forth the whole dive and deco was spent going back and forth along the wall. Our 02 time was a little cold as the water temp near to the surface was a bubbly warm 39 degrees :)

Back on the boat we were....getting warmed up by the hot soup and hot chocolate we were served by the staff. It was nice to come up to :) Everyone had a great dive and lots of pictures were taken on the dives.

A relaxing surface interval was had by all taking in the great service of the staff and we slowly travelling toward our next dive which was to be Swede's Reef which was back near toward Egmont Marina. The sun was trying to break through at this time and the scenary was just beautitul!

We anchored in about 25' of water at Swede's Reef and Kal gave us a dive breifing on the site as none of us had ever done this dive before. It was a large pinnicale dive with many critters to see and apparantly Puget Sound King Crabs were the highlight of this dive.

Though this dive could be done 'deep', everyone chose to make this a 32% dive as there was no need to venture deeper than about 90' and the average was going to be 60'.

In we went once again and this dive was one of the most relaxing dives I have ever done. The dive had a really nice bottom contour. It had a little bit of everything. Lots of critters all over the place and yes, the Puget Sound King Crabs were abundant on this dive site. We saw four on our dive alone! They were massive! This dive site was very big so you could pretty much cover a ton of area and as it was a live boat pickup, you could go pretty much anywhere which was nice. The viz was unbeleiveable here as well as in parts it was about 80-100' easily. Very nice indeed.

We called our dive on the stage and ascended to the surface where we were greeted by nice bright sunshine. It was sooooo nice to come up to. Everyone was back on board the boat and packing up for our long commute back to Vancouver. We were back at the dock by 4:00pm and were driving away from Egmont by 4:15pm.

Stopped at the pub on the way down to the ferry for a quick bite to eat and share our diving stories with each other about the days events.

There were TONS of laughs from our meeting time on the morning to our 'goodbyes' in the evening. We arrived back in Vancouver at around 8:00pm. Long day....but it was worth it.

Many smiles from all divers along for the dives, many friends were made and future dive buddies I can imagine. Thanks for all for coming and I would recommend this area to anyone that wants to venture up to the Sunshine Coast.

A few pictures I will post once downloaded very quickly.....

Thanks all,

Todd