Six Dives, Three Sites, and a Frankly Unreasonable Number of Octopuses

Photo credit: Nate Cermak

I saw it moving below us and my immediate reaction was to shake my light around like I was trying to land a plane until Dillon and Nate looked over.

Giant Pacific octopus. Not tucked back in a crack, not a suggestion of one tentacle behind a rock. Fully out in the open, moving around, going about its day.

Before this trip I had seen exactly one GPO in my life, and it was wedged so far back into a crevice that "seen" is doing some heavy lifting. Over three days around Nanaimo we found two of them out in the open and a handful more tucked into cracks. It was absurd. It's still the first thing I say when anyone asks how the trip was.

Trip Overview

Three days, three shore sites — Madrona, Oak Leaf, and Tyee Cove — six dives for me, with Dillon and Nate. Dillon's been my dive buddy since nearly the start of diving in Seattle; Nate's the marine-life brain with the good camera (and writeups that read like field surveys). Both are fantastic.

I took a Friday off work for this. The whole trip was satisfying and nice and completely exhausting, roughly in that order.

Getting There, and the Shape of the Days

Getting to Nanaimo from Seattle is a project. You drive up to Tsawwassen, take the ferry to Duke Point, and then do the whole thing in reverse on the way home. Both crossings were calm and honestly pleasant — time on the water with nothing to do, and a cafeteria with surprisingly decent food. Low expectations, cleared easily.

We stayed at an Airbnb in Nanoose. It was perfectly average, which is exactly what you want from a place you're using to sleep in and hang wet gear in. The days had a shape and we did not deviate from it: up around 8, get tanks filled at Nanaimo Dive Outfitters, grab some food, do a dive, pack up, move to a different site, do two more. By the time we surfaced from the last one we'd be pushing 8 o'clock, at which point we went and got dinner.

Here's the part that doesn't make it into photos: it was hot. Standing around in a drysuit in August is functionally wearing a sauna, and I was sweating through all my undergarments before getting anywhere near the water. Several of the entries also had a decent walk to get down to the beach. Carrying that much gear over a trail is worth it and..... it is not fun. Those two things are both true at once and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Tanks staged on the sandstone. This is the good part — the walk down here was the bad part.

The view from the top of the entry at Madrona. Worth every step.

Oak Leaf and Tyee Cove

Oak Leaf had a strange layered thing going on — a warm, hazy top layer down to about 40 feet, some mixing down to 50, and then it opened up into great visibility below. Boot sponges, four or five cabezon, one GPO tucked away. The standout was a massive field of purple urchins by the west entry with an equally overwhelming number of black-eyed gobies swarming through it.

Tyee Cove is where we saw the first open-water GPO of the trip — fully out, going about its day. Good viz otherwise. Somewhere around dive five of six, three days deep, the rest of that site blurs into one long pleasant ocean journey, and I've decided that's fine.

Madrona, and the Octopus Situation

Madrona was the best of the three, and it isn't close.

You work your way out to a wall that drops to about 100 feet. Kicking over the lip gave me something close to vertigo — the bottom just stops being there. Forty feet of viz on the better dives, fading into black past 50 or 60. At 80 feet it went weirdly dusk-like. Eerie, but the good kind.

The life was ridiculous: a big skate hanging around, a cabezon actively eating a gunnel, sunflower stars the size of dinner platters (only one of them wasting). Big shoutout to Nate for his expert IDing to help us know what we were looking at!

But the thing I actually got better at was reading the dens. Spot a pile of broken shells outside a crack — a midden — get to the right angle, shine your light in, and reliably find tentacles. Sometimes a head. At Madrona it stopped feeling like luck and started feeling like a skill. And Madrona is also where I spotted one out in the open — the light-shaking moment that opens this post. Small-to-medium as GPOs go, which still felt enormous compared to the octos around Seattle.

The other thing about diving with people you like: the underwater fistbump. High point was an egg yolk jelly getting eaten alive by crabs — genuinely gnarly, immediately fistbump-worthy.

Between dives: grocery-store turkey sandwiches on the rocks in the sun, still half-damp, plus a mom and baby seal hauled out about ten feet apart, completely unbothered by us and all our gear.

Scalyhead sculpin, doing its best to look unimpressed. Photo credit: Nate Cermak

Mom and baby on the rocks, completely unbothered.

The Dive Where I Forgot How to Dive

The one usable frame. Photo credit: Me!

At some point Nate let me borrow his camera for a dive.

I've got pretty decent diving skills however after four minutes of holding that camera I was terrible at keeping track of my buddies, my buoyancy was awful, and I was going through air noticeably faster than normal. It was so much harder than I expected.

It felt exactly like being a new diver again, which was humbling and, in retrospect, pretty funny.

I got one photo out of it. It's a wolf eel, tucked under a ledge, looking directly at the camera with that face only a wolf eel has. Worth it.

Beer, Wet Gear, and the Ferry Home

Rusted Rake in Nanoose. We went twice. We'd have gone a third time. Photo credit: Nate Cermak

Dinner both nights was at Rusted Rake Brewing in Nanoose — farm-to-tap, great vibe, good food, good beer, and right by the Airbnb. The second visit was less a considered decision than the fact that we were too fried to research anywhere else, but it held up completely. No regrets.

Then back to the house, where the evening ritual was hanging every piece of gear we owned off every available surface and quietly hoping some of it would be dry by morning. A short hangout, and bed, because 8am comes fast.

The ferry ride home was the three of us eating some food, scrolling back through the photos, and just enjoying the downtime. Nobody had much left in the tank. By the time we got home you could tell we were all happy and completely wiped out.

Logistics & Practical Information

Reflections & Final Thoughts

There's a version of a long weekend where you sleep in, and this was not that. Up at 8, tanks, food, dive, drive, dive, dive, dinner, hang the gear up, sleep, repeat. By the ferry ride home the three of us were just sitting there eating and flipping through photos, out of words.

But somewhere in the middle of one of those dives — sweating in a drysuit on land, freezing-adjacent at 80 feet, watching an octopus that had no interest in hiding from us — I remember thinking very clearly that this was much better than sitting at a desk.

Nothing that happened over the next three days changed my mind.