THe weekend of 5/19-21 is a three day weekend in Canada with Monday being Queen Victoria day. A number of BCUE divers headed over to Bamfield on the Barkley Sound the invite of Curt Smeckler.
Barkley Sound is on the west side of Vancouver Island and Bamfield is located on the southern western edge of the sound and is therefore is quite close to the Pacific ocean. Unlike the BC dive sites I have dived up until now the dives sites are at the receiving end of the Pacific Ocean swells. Barkley Sound has a number of islands and a number of wrecks.

From Vancouver, Bamfield is reached via a 2 hour ferry running between Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. From Nanaimo, Port Albernai is about a 1 hour drive north and then
Bamfield is about a 45 mile drive west along a maintained logging road which was basically a dirt and gravel road. I carpooled up with Dirk and we met at Turner Way at 10:00 and headed up to ferry. We were
hoping to make the 12:30 PM ferry but actually ended up being one of last cars on the 10:30 AM.

After we arrived in Nanaimo we headed a few miles north to dive site named Madronna. We did a quick beach dive, swa 5 wolf eels, a GPO in its den and a variety of other marine life.

Following the dive we head up to Port Alberni arriving around 4:30 PM and then headed out to Bamfield ariving close to 6:00 PM. We left messages on Curt's and Chris Fenton voicemail but as it turned out both
were still on the way to Bamfield. Curt was bringing the dive boat Whimsy down from Port Alberni (Barkley Sound almost cuts Vancouver Island into 2) and Chris was driving down. The road ends in East Bamfield and Curt and Chris homes are in West Bamfield which requires a short trip across the harbor. Once Chris showed up we loaded gear into a smaller boat, parked the cars and motored over to West Bamfield. Whimsy was there and we loaded the tanks onto the boat and then headed up to Curts. On the property at Curts house is the dive shed with plenty of room to store dive gear and a full head with shower as well as the 9cfm dive compressor. We stored our gear in the shed and then headed up to house for a bit of dinner and night of the sleep.

In the morning we has additional divers joining us with the scheduled departure time of 10:00 AM.

We headed out in morning to dive a high spot that Curt had identified as possible new dive site. I ended up with some gear issues so sat the dive out. The ocean swells coming onto the high spot created some interesting conditions for getting on and off the boat but we got everyone safely in and out of the water. Some divers reported some interested bottom and others reported pretty much diving on sand.

For the surface interval/lunch we headed for a protected area between 3 islands. A few of Kirtk's had a house and dock here and ran an oyster aquaculture setup.

After lunch we headed to a wall on Nanit Islet which was not exposed to the swell I dived with Chris and Kim and did a Tech 1 dive along the slope and wall. Initially we dove on sand but as we approached the point it turned into a quite nice dive.

Saturday night was spent at Curt's. .

In the morning we headed out to the Broken Island group and the wreck of the Van Leer. The Van Leer was freighter carrying a bunch of Dodge Colts from Japan in the 70's. It pretty left without any functional navigation gear and probably thought Barkley Sound was Puget Sound. In fog in ran up on the rocks and apparently was high and dry for a couple of years before sliding into the ocean. Curt, Dirk and I dived the outside of the portion of the wreck that sat to the west of the rocks.

The afternoon dive was a search for the wreck of Thiepval which was a Coast Guard vessel that sank in 1932. We had its approximate location and Chris and Kim made a scooter dive without being able to locate it. Curt and I then did a similar search and after no luck chose to search an area to a bit north of the original site. We had no luck but when we returned to our anchored boat, we discovered Chris and Kim and ultimately found it. On our remaining gas we were able to spend 10 mins on the wreck.

Sunday night was again spent at Curts where we feasted on a spaghetti prepared by Curt.

On Monday morning we had an enjoyable dive on Turner Island and then it was off to pack up gear and dash off to catch the Nanaimo ferry.