The wind was going crazy in Victoria today (Oct. 26, 2009) so I drove up to Maple Bay, launched my boat at the public ramp and went about halfway down Sansum Narrows to Sansum Point, which sticks out into the Narrows on the Vancouver Island side. On the way, a large Steller's sealion jumped halfway out of the water with a salmon in it's mouth right in front of my boat. A few more salmon jumped out of the water as I went to the point. I tied up right next to the point itself and swam straight out. Of course I timed it according to the Sansum Narrows current table. The immediate shallows looked like Saanich Inlet with rockweed and sargassum seaweed. At about 20 feet deep, I started to see plumose anemones. There were large orange and white ones and clusters of small white ones. There were also lots of urchins, cup corals, some hydrocoral, yellow sponge, cemented tube worm colonies, etc. Visibility was a milky 15-20 feet which, so far, is the best I've seen in Sansum Narrows. The bottom was a gradual slope of reefs and boulders with some sandy patches that went down to about 50-60 feet deep. Then there was sand with lots of tube-dwelling anemones and a couple of seapens. I saw a small octopus out in the open. The most common fish were kelp greenlings, but there were also a few small lingcod, rockfish (copper, quillback, brown), perch and a buffalo sculpin. I swam back up to a reef that stuck out from the point. It was topped with stalked kelp and some bull kelp. I was starting to feel the current picking up so I swam back to my boat. There were clusters of small anemones under it in the shallows. This area where I left my boat wasn't as sheltered as I thought. The now-ebbing current was running past it and out around the point. If I had just anchored it and not tied it up as well, it might not have still been there. Of course, the current here only runs up to a few knots so it might have been fine.
