I've been trying out a lot of "uninteresting"-type places lately. Armstrong point is the Southern point of Tsehum Harbour or the Northern point of Roberts Bay in Sidney. At the end of Allbay Road, there is a public beach access with room for a car or two to park, a bench and a short trail down to a rocky beach. The jagged rocks seem like an uplifted sort of shale with a band of conglomerate here and there. On the chart, there is some kind of wall at the point going down to 20 or 30 feet deep. This area gets some current and I was curious to see if a steep, rocky area would host more life than the flat, muddy bottom at the Sidney Pier. I tried it on March 13, 2008. I swam straight out from the end of the trail and then turned right towards the point. Sure enough, the rocks dropped down steeply to a sandy bottom 20-30 feet deep. Visibility was around 15-20 feet. I was diving on the Current Atlas slack, but the current was still noticeable. What surprised me was that, despite this current, the rock was only covered with silty red seaweed. There were none of the invertebrates you'd expect in a steep, rocky area with current. I followed the base of the wall out until I was well around the point into Roberts Bay and then swam back halfway up the wall. I only saw one anemone on the whole dive. It was a fallen-over white plumose that seemed to have dropped in accidentally. The base of the wall had piles of flat slabs of shale that had fallen down the slope. There was some obvious man-made stuff (pipe, concrete, bits of plywood) mixed in so maybe the slabs were construction waste that was pushed off the point after leveling the land for building the local houses. These jumbled slabs formed all kinds of hollows that I'd normally expect to house a variety of fish, although here I just saw 2 small copper rockfish and a few gobies. The most common creatures here seemed to be mating dungeness crabs. They would scurry away, stirring up the silt as I swam along. There were a few nudibranchs as usual scattered around, some of them actually leaving trails on the silty blades of kelp. I assume the silt is organic (diatoms or decomposing kelp) rather than mineral sediment. Anyway, after over an hour underwater here, I've definitely had enough and don't plan on coming here again. I just had to make sure there wasn't some big cavern covered with soft corals or something.
