This is a long, narrow island off the Sidney area. It's known for being a sea bird nesting site. I came here on the Sea Dive charter boat for an off-slack dive. Most of the good dive sites in this area are exposed to lots of current, but we did a less current-sensitive dive here while waiting for the slack later in the afternoon. We entered along the North side of the island near some small buildings and swam towards the Western tip. Visibility in the shallows was only 10' or so, but it started to clear a bit as we went deeper.
At first, the marine life seemed to consist of red urchins, California cucumbers, red rock crabs and orange burrowing cucumbers. As I went deeper and farther towards the tip of the island, there were also lots of feather-type hydroids covering many of the rocks, yellow staghorn bryozoans and even some small patches of encrusting hydrocoral. The solid rocky slope seemed to mostly end about 60' deep and then there was a slope of sand with rocky reefs here and there. My maximum depth was 85', but most of the dive was spent closer to 60' deep. I was surprised to not see any anemones at all. There were also no fish for the first part of the dive. Visibility down at the base of the rocky slope was about 30'.
So far, I hadn't seen any fish of any species (which seemed strange), but I eventually reached an area where there were several quillback, copper, yellowtail and brown rockfish. There were also a few small lingcod.
So far, during the dive I didn't see a single anemone, but up in the shallows there was a boulder with a few plumose anemones around it.
I didn't make it all the way to the tip of the island, but I think this end of the island had a bit more marine life (especially fish) than back where we started along the middle of the island. I don't see this as a great dive site that is worth coming out here just to dive it, but for an off-slack "filler" dive I think it's pretty good. I like it better than Arbutus Island and Wain Rock which are more well-known boat dive destinations. This is probably a good time of year to dive here (Summer) since much of the colour here comes from the orange burrowing cucumbers. In the winter, they go dormant and retract their tentacles (arms?).
