All week I was planning on the Northwest dive show in Tacoma and then diving at Sund Rock on the way back. That was the plan until Friday night rolled around and the thought of being in a noisy convention center after being stuck on 2 airline flights earlier in the week just wasn't going to work . Lenny and I settled on meeting at Hoodsport n dive at 1PM on Saturday, which was fine except I didn't know what Lenny looked like. Fair enough, he didn't know what I looked like either. We figured it out.
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| Sea Whip |
The sun and warmer weather had finally hit the Northwest which for divers here is both a blessing a curse. Now we can get in our dive gear and into our 45 degree water (that's Fahrenheit not Celsius) without feeling like we were in a refrigerator first. Once again though the algae and other small creatures are inhabiting the Sound mucking up our pristine 25 foot visibility. Lenny and I dropped in on the Northern buoy and I immediately became disoriented due to the low visibility and lack of light. And this is the other problem with the algae bloom, sunlight penetration is severely reduced. It will get so bad that diving on a sunny afternoon will be like night diving in a dark closet. This was my excuse for immediately heading off in the wrong direction moving a bit South and missing the northern wall completely, even though the visibility had cleared considerably below 20 feet. At 50 feet I knew we had missed the wall. At 70 feet we found the sea whips. At 80 feet we turned around. At 40 feet I went South in the completely opposite direction of the wall. I eventually turned us around and headed North reaching the wall with 1100 psi in the tank. We never did find the octopus on eggs that John McKenzie mentioned was at the Norther end of the wall, but I had gotten us to the wall and that was good enough.
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| Stripped Sun Star Eating a Stiff-footed Sea Cucumber |
Visibility for the second dive was as bad if not worse than the first. We made our way over the rocks on the South side of the inlet by feel, certainly not by site, before heading off along the wall. The nutritious broth we swam though was home to numerous jelly fish fluttering through the cool, murky water. As we dropped down towards 40 feet the structure making up the South Wall appeared before us in perfect clarity compared to the broth above. The area was devoid of octopus and wolf eels that are normally abundant in the area. Nudibranchs and other animals were missing from the landscape. Copious numbers of plumose anemones, bound forever to the rock, stretched their frilled tentacles while tube dwelling anemones, embeded in the soft sediment, extended their outer tentacles in search of food. Well into the dive the cold began wrapping its icy fingers around my torso causing small tremors I was helpless to stop. We turned around and headed back, until feather duster worms provided one final distraction. Again we entered the murky waters to watch the jellyfish billowing their translucent bodies. We finished our safety stop and stepped into the sun filled afternoon of a Northwest spring.
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| Tube Dwelling Anemones |
For more photos click here
Epic as usual!
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