Victoria, BC
Friday-Saturday, 25-26 August, 2023
Smoky sunset from the pier in Victoria.
Victoria is an delightfully cute little town with incredible scenery, right on the water at the southern tip of Vancouver Island. It's a bit like a larger Sausalito.
Luck was with us--it only took about ten minutes to get through the line to cross the Canadian border! Luck was with us yet again as we managed to get on the 14:00 ferry with a wait of only about 45 minutes! We had been unable to get a reservation before 21:00, so we were in the unusual position of being hours ahead of schedule.
Smoky ferry ride.
Ferries passing in the haze.
Having hastily rebooked reservations a few days prior, I had been unable to get us a room in adorable downtown Victoria. But the Four Points Sheraton out in Langford had the advantage of being fairly close to the dive shop where we would be going on Saturday, and luck struck yet again as we got a free upgrade to a jacuzzi room! Hot running water is one of the primary benefits of coming back into civilization from the wilderness. Photo by Eric.
Eric took a picture looking down at the patio bar from our room.
In Victoria, you can enjoy Red Fish-Blue Fish, fantastic, sustainable, locally caught fish fry, served out of a recycled shipping container on the pier. Lines are long, but the food is worth the wait, and you eat it right there on the pier with incredible views. We first heard about it from a touring cyclist we met at Mt. Rainier. We loved it, even in the rain, when we were last in Victoria in 2010.
We shared our delicious fish fry dinner with our friend Silven, who had just moved to Victoria.
Silven was our first California friend and also one of our earliest geocaching friends. She had not gone geocaching in years, so we took her to find a cache near the pier. We saw the BC Capitol from the site.
In the morning, we met Mark at Wilson Diving, and got fitted into rental drysuits. The difference in comfort between rental drysuits and rental wetsuits is immeasurable.
Mark took us to the beach at the Ogden Point Breakwater. To us, it was a very familiar-looking sort of dive site, with an even more protected entry than the breakwater at Monterey.
We donned our exposure protection on the beach, where we met other guides from the shop. Mara was an expert diver who was teaching an advanced open water course to a couple of young men. Luke, who would come along with us on the dive, complained that he had heard that the US was very pretty, but that it was full of Americans. He claimed that his father had been in jail since he was four months old, but I wasn't sure whether or not he was kidding.
The dive was relatively unremarkable, except that I hadn't clipped my weights in as well as I should, and I dropped one of the sets at one point. Despite having made this dumb mistake, I was quite proud that I managed to slow my ascent partway up. Fortunately we were only in about 7 m/23 ft of depth. Luke helped me get back down, found the weights on the bottom, and clipped them back into my pocket. We saw some rockfish, quite a few crabs of different species, and a beautiful jelly. At such shallow depth, we were able to dive for 43 minutes, although I was quite cold and desperate to go to the bathroom by the time we returned to the beach. In an all-too-typical fashion, we spent too long getting into our equipment, and were only able to fit in one dive. This was our first Pacific Northwest dive (of three) with no Giant Pacific Octopus. Nevertheless, the experience of diving once again was lovely, and the skills refresher was valuable for us.
The other divers were all in a hurry to get the gear back to the shop before it closed, but we took a leisurely walk along the breakwater in search of a geocache. Photo by Eric.
Lighthouse at the end of the breakwater.
I posed at the lighthouse for Eric.
A harbor seal swam nimbly along the breakwater.
Eric photographed a beautiful blue Comet convertible.
We met Tom, who had converted a 2013 Nissan Leaf into a transformer. He also replaced the motor and doubled its range from 151 km/94 mi to 300 km/186 mi. I still don't find that a particularly impressive range, so I'm keeping Mather for now. Tom really liked to talk and clearly would have gone on talking about his car for another half an hour, but we had decided to be very American and get a Costco pizza for dinner, and we were coming up on closing time.
I was never a big fan of the whole Costco experience, or of shopping in general, before the pandemic, and, during that miserable time from March of 2020 through June of 2021, one thing I absolutely did not miss was waiting in line. I was uncomfortable even running into Costco in a mask for ten minutes to get a pizza. But the pizza was as great as always, and we haven't had it since 2019 or maybe early 2020. We had to eat the leftovers cold in the morning, though, because hotels with restaurants don't provide microwaves.
The second stage of the cache turned out to be right near our hotel, so we walked off the pizza on a bridge across Florence Lake. Eric took my picture on the bridge.
We were on vacation, having fun, and on a roll of achieving objectives.
On to Tofino.