Dive #459 - Madrona Small Wall - 20 January 2021
Beautiful night for a dive, with bright stars above. Fantastic critter spotting as we swam very slowly along the wall. Bay pipefish, several smallish Red Irish Lords, 4 barnacle nudibranchs (!), small cockscombs (one slender and one high, I think), spotted leopard dorids, some beautifully decorated graceful crabs, two mosshead warbonnets, 3 Buffalo sculpins all in the same meter square, 3 painted greenlings of increasingly smaller sizes within a 1/2m square, Thick-horned Nudi, Nanaimo Dorid, super curious and photogenic young orange wolf eel, small PSKC, two GPOs, kelp greenling dad guarding well-developed and mostly hatched eggs, sailfin sculpin, 2 mosshead warbonnets, heart crab, sunflower star, two grunt sculpins on eggs, and gunnel couples in rock holes. As we rounded the corner, a juvenile GPO was strolling along the kelp. It eventually dissapeared into a little crack in the rock/sand. Plainfin midshipmen in the shallows.
Cold but clear and lovely. One of my most recent favourite dives.