Friday December 23 - Got Crab? Diving at the hood canal

The crab catch and deco beer

A couple of workers from the Hood Canal Bridge stopped by as we were donning our dive gear to warn us "Don't get to close to the bridge, someone always calls it in".  No worries with us, we know what we're doing.  We followed the bottom not paying as much attention as we should have to our depth or direction.  The canal bottom was sand and silt without any structures to provide us our bearings.  Our depth dropped almost imperceptibly until we hit 85 feet.  No crabs.  Katie suggested we go up a bit as our air was dropping and we still had to swim back.  We came upon thick cables we took to be the power and telephone lines running across the canal and began following them back in.  Odd that they were a few feet off the bottom.  Our air was getting low and we were still at 85 feet so we headed to the surface and popped up a third of the way along the bridge.  The cables we followed were part of the bridge structure.  Jaymie's warning came to mind, we moved away from the bridge as fast as possible.  We could have been in some real trouble though if the current was ripping through since we hadn't checked the tidal exchange.  Luckily it wasn't.  For the second dive we stayed near the contour going no deeper than about 50 feet.  Katie threatened to bale on us if we ventured to far and I was clearly not put in charge of leading the group.  Back at the truck our friends from the bridge stopped by again.  They had been periodocally watching us  and wondered if we made it back okay and if we caught enough crab;  They didn't mention our popping up near the bridge.  What do you mean "Do we have enough crab?"  Do we have enough people?