Whenever I've been diving at Dolphin Beach, I've swam straight out and to the right. This brings you to a wall that people consider to be the main feature of this site. A sidescan sonar image of the coastline shows another large rocky area to the North of the entry-point beach. I drove up from Victoria for a look on Sept. 6, 2019.
I walked to the left side of the cove and then swam out to a shallow rock (barely covered at high tide) just off the point that is North of Dolphin Beach. The sidescan image shows the rocky area I was looking for was straight out (North) from this shallow rocky area.
I swam down the steep rocky slope at the North side of the shallow rock. This slope ended about 60-70' deep and then there was a flatter slope with large sandy areas covered with lots of small nudibranchs. Visibility was about 15' in the shallows, 10' between 20-30' deep and below that it was a nice and bright 50-60'.
I continued to swim out North. The topography was a mix of sand/gravel areas, large rocky reefs and rubble/boulders. I didn't notice any straight-down walls like at the regular Dolphin Beach dive area. Below 70-80', there were lots of feather stars covering the rocks. Even some of the flatter, gravel areas had fields of feather stars. There were also a few crimson anemones, sea pens and boot sponges. I didn't see any cloud sponges. There weren't many fish. I saw a few copper and quillback rockfish and a small lingcod. My maximum depth was about 115'.
Eventually, after spending most of my dive below 80' deep, I started swimming back to shore. It was going to be a long swim so to avoid accumulating more nitrogen I ascended to about 30' deep and followed my compass back in mid-water. After what seemed like longer than expected, I reached a shallow rocky pinnacle with a top about 15' deep that was a perfect spot to finish my decompression. When I surfaced, I saw that I must have biased my heading too far to the West. I was a good distance past the point so it was a long surface-swim to get back to my Dolphin Beach entry point.
With the good visibility, this was a great day to explore a new-to-me area. I think it was a pretty good dive, but I don't think it is as good as the main wall that most people visit at Dolphin Beach. The long swim might also discourage me from diving here very often.
