WATCH: Divemaster records breathtaking underwater videos of octopus off Vancouver Island

A Vancouver Island diver has captured incredible footage of an octopus in the waters of Nanoose Bay.

Since he was a little boy, Carl Sorenson wanted to take up scuba diving. But the Qualicum Beach web designer didn’t take the plunge until the world shut down during COVID.

“I was watching YouTube videos about diving and I just decided, ‘You know what? It’s time to do it.’ So I looked up a local company, and signed up for the course right away,” Sorenson said.

“Our instructor asked us, how do you make a good diver a really bad diver? And I didn’t know. And he said, you give him a camera. So I thought if I was going to be a bad diver right from the start, I might as well start with a camera.”

Sorenson began recording his dives with a GoPro, but found the footage didn’t accurately capture the beauty he was seeing with his own eyes. So he went all in on $20,000 4K underwater rig with lights, and has been posting his videos online.

“I love to create it and show people what’s down there,” said Sorenson, who dives alongside his wife.

“Every single dive, we see amazing things. Even if you’re at the same site and you dive at 100 times or 200 times, it’s always different.”

Sorenson quickly developed an affinity for octopus.

“They’re just the fascinating creatures. The way that they move, that they’re intelligent, they’re curious, they interact with you,” he said. “Finding them in dens is not difficult, but finding them out in the open and actually, you know, conducting octopus business, that’s the hard part. And that’s luck, time in the water, and patience.”

This week, he posted a two-hour compilation of octopus video he shot during 600 dives over the past 3 years to his website, www.scubabc.ca.

It includes some stunning encounters. In one, he waits patiently for an octopus on a sunken buoy to move.

“And at the 50 minute mark, it finally trusted me enough, and it slowly crawled out and started to go around the bay and hunting,” Sorenson said. “At one point it even turned, looked at me, came right at me, crawled all over my camera, was touching all my buttons and dials and knobs, and then got bored of that and decided to continue on what it was doing.”

In another memorable encounter, an octopus approached his wife.

“It walked right up to her and grabbed her arm and kind of started a pulling like it wanted to pull her in a direction, and she didn’t want to go,” he said. “So she kind of resisted for a little bit, and then it got bored and walked alongside of her. And that’s another one that we followed it around for 15 or 20 minutes as it went about its octopus business.”

Sorenson is now a divemaster with hundreds of hours under his belt, but he still gets a thrill when he spots an octopus.

“Every single time, because their personalities are so different. You can find some octopus that are co-operative and they’re curious about you. They’re reaching out and touching you, touching your gear that you can just see from their eye movements that they’re tracking you, they’re paying attention to you,” he said.

“And then there’s others that are so big I don’t want them to come out. I don’t want them to come near me because they’re like Kraken. They’re huge!”

While Sorenson is open to turning his underwater videos into a side hustle, he’s posting them for free right now to give people a glimpse of what’s in the waters around British Columbia.

“Just for people to get a new appreciation for these interesting creatures,” he said. “You know, we have them here, we know they’re here. But until you get in the water and experience them, I don’t even know how words can describe it.”