Vancouver Island - Diving

We were feeling pretty disheartened after the afternoon of hunting for camp grounds and coming up empty handed, so we headed to Nanaimo, via Lake Cowichan, to find a big camping ground.

There's not a lot to do near Lake Cowichan, we went to the Cowichan Provincial Park and stopped at a few places a long it. There wasn't much of note to see, except a pretty waterfall that had not track to it, so we made out own.

Brandon decided we wanted to try and sort out a dive for the next day, so we drove to Nanaimo to find a dive shop. Most of the social dives seem to be on Sundays, so we signed up for a "bio-blitz" taking place on Saturday, and hired some gear for it. We stayed the night at "Living Forest Campgrounds", which were ok. It seems like most campgrounds have coin machines in the showers, where you have to pay roughly $1 per 5minutes of shower time. They are a bit different to Australian camp grounds; each site will have a picnic table and a little metal fire pit, but the communal barbecue and picnic under-cover area is absent (sometime that is basically always present in Australia as far as I know). This just makes it super inconvenient when it's raining and you want to cook food, because you either need a tarp or you're standing in the rain to cook.
I have decided I don't like big camp grounds, too many weird people, too many kids, too many people using the wifi and making it unusable.

Our campsite for 3 days. The annex is a lot of work to use...

The view from the campgrounds

The next day, we drove about 30mins north of Nanaimo to the park where the Bioblitz was taking place. It is basically a nature survey. So we suited up in 14mm of wet suit, and gingerly stepped into the 7 degree water. Everyone else was diving in dry suits and was calling us brave!

The dive was pretty cool, we saw giant nudibranchs, the size of my forearm, heaps of colourful urchins and star fish, and different anemones that we hadn't seen before. We had to surface on the way out because the current was too strong, and it was a really hard swim against it even on the surface. We had heaps of weight on, due to our thick wetsuits. I was using 24 pounds and brandon I think 36 pounds.
We were both pretty tired, so we didn't do much in the afternoon. We tried to use the wifi at the campgrounds, but couldn't even search a place to eat dinner, so we went and used wifi at a shopping centre. At least the showers were hot!