Went to a dive site off Port Hardy last month and noticed something weird about the viz

We were doing a pipeline inspection near the north end of Vancouver Island and the visibility dropped from 30 feet to almost zero in under 10 minutes. Has anyone else run into sudden silt-outs like that up there, or was it just a one-off thing with the currents?

2 comments

2 Comments

tara_palmer1mo ago

Oh man, that reminds me of a time I was diving near Campbell River and the whole bottom just went beige in what felt like seconds. We figured out later a tugboat had swung too close to shore and kicked up decades of settled muck. Might be worth checking if any boats were working nearby when it happened, even if they were far off.

henderson.mila1mo ago

I get what you're saying, but I think that tugboat theory might be a stretch here. The water clarity issue I saw was more of a gradual brown haze that hung around for days, not a sudden cloud like you described. Boat wakes could stir up silt for sure, but that usually clears in hours unless it's a really shallow spot. Plus I checked marine traffic logs for that week and there wasn't anything big moving through. I'm leaning more toward a natural algae bloom or maybe runoff from all that rain we had.