The Southern half of Saanich Inlet is one big dive site, but for now, I'm trying to focus on places with obvious landmarks on the surface. This way, if I find anything interesting I'll be able to find it again. Landmarks don't get much more obvious than a giant, checkerboard marker under a major set of powerlines. This is across Finlayson Arm (on the East side) from the "Under the Powerlines" site I've visited before. I tied up my boat to a fallen tree on a tiny, rubble beach under the cliffs near the Southern-most marker (there are two markers under the powerlines on this side of the inlet). This was on Feb. 6, 2010. There were a few seals bobbing around just offshore waiting to dart away in terror when they saw my camera. Visibility in the shallows was only a few feet, but below 10 feet deep, it cleared to 50-80 feet. The bottom dropped off in the usual Saanich Inlet walls, boulder slopes, sandy areas and reefs. The chart shows it going down to around 300 feet deep. I went down to about 130 feet, where there were several boulders and small, overhanging reefs with boot sponges hanging off them. This is the most concentrated population of boot sponges I've seen anywhere. Usually I see a few here and there, but here I saw about 40 of them during my limited stay at this depth. Most of the rock surface was also covered with lampshells. I saw a few small cloud sponges as well. Back in reasonable depths, there were lots of egg-guarding lingcod, some giant nudibranchs and clouds of moon jellies up near the bad visibility layer.
