This past month was spent on beautiful Vancouver Island training to be a commercial diver. This license allows me to participate in working dives, such as underwater jobs within the film industry. The course is only four weeks long and very intense, after a week of theory in the class it is straight to the water!. All training dives are done in the ocean and we would typically do three to four dives every day. During this time, we learned how to work as a team and how to various projects underwater, including building a box. While I had seen several cool creatures while diving, I was focused on my work and not able to fully appreciate all the life underwater.
After the course I geared up to be a tourist and headed up to the Island to Port Hardy, where I boarded a boat for God’s Pocket Diving Resort. This place is considered some of the best and most luxurious diving in Canada and it lived up to its reputation The combination of cold water and currents result in one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world. Creatures ranged from massive nudibranchs to bright yellow crabs to wolf eels and everything else imaginable.
Encountering a Giant Pacific Octopus while diving has to be one of the coolest experiences of my life. Seeing it was amazing, but then it tried to steal my camera.
While at the Seven Trees Dive site at God’s Pocket Resort, a diver swimming ahead of me suddenly started signaling with his light. Knowing that he had found something, I quickly made sure the camera was ready and then swam over. As I got closer, I could see the octopus hanging out on the wall. I was extremely excited since seeing one of these incredible creatures was high on my bucket list. The octopus started moving towards me and I am thrilled, making sure to get every angle. Then the octopus comes closer, and closer. It then reaches out its arms towards me and uses its suckers to grab on to my camera.
Knowing that it was just curious I carefully pulled the tentacles off and it floated back down to the wall. Thinking that was done I refocused my camera, not realizing that it was about 7 feet long and those arms were reaching for the camera again. This time the octopus had a better grip and it took a bit longer to get them off. After that I made sure to stay back from the wall when the tentacles reached out again, I wanted to have pictures to show later. After a bit the octopus got bored of not having my camera and began to slowly head deeper where we were not planning to dive.
We finished the dive and came up, very excited for the next chance to encounter a Giant Pacific Octopus.
Story Submitted by Kayla Martin
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