Hooked up last evening with Uncle Pug and his son-in-law Shane for a dive at one of Puget Sound's premier dive sites ... Day Island Wall. It's a clay wall that sits in the south end of the Tacoma Narrows, and as such is not very diveable most of the time due to current. But last night we caught the confluence of a very small tidal exchange, pretty darn good visibility, and a beautiful end-of-summer day that combined for one of the better dives I've had in a long time.
Gearing up at the car, we walked down a narrow path to the water, and surface kicked out about four or five minutes ... dropping down into the bull kelp at about 25 fsw. Swimming downslope, we hit the top of the wall at about 45 feet. The wall has two sections, with a break in between that is the legacy of the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. We did the north wall first, which is the smaller, shallower section, dropping down to only about 60 feet and petering out as it heads north. I rather quickly found a wolf eel den ... only to discover that my camera, for some reason, didn't want to function properly. I couldn't get the internal flash to fire ... and since my strobes are optical slaves, no flash means no strobes. This wasn't good. While I fiddled around trying to figure it out, Uncle Pug moved in and got a few shots, and we moved on. Finding a couple more wolfies and an octopus as we proceeded to peruse the north wall, I kept fiddling with my camera and Uncle Pug kept taking advantage of the photo opportunities. As we headed south, toward the greater part of the wall, I somehow managed ... using the tried and true "blind squirrel" method ... to hit the correct sequence of buttons, and suddenly my camera decided to cooperate.
The south wall angles out away from shore, and gets progressively deeper as you proceed toward where it ends in a large, semi-circular shaped wall we call "the amphitheatre". As you proceed south, the top of the wall goes from about 60 fsw to about 75 fsw ... and the bottom approaches 100 fsw. The wall is adorned with the usual Puget Sound inverterbrates, crabs, starfish, tunicates ... and the peculiar species of sculpin known as a "red Irish lord" (shown in one of Uncle Pug's pictures above). The amphitheatre, on the other hand, is the home of many octos and wolfies ... the current having sculpted swirling shapes, holes and little wolfie-sized caverns in the clay for them to live in. By the time we arrived there, what little current we'd experienced was starting to swing in the general direction of home, and after getting our fill of sleeping octopus and curious wolf eels, we headed up over the wall and angled toward our entry ... making our way back through the bull kelp along the way.
Overall a great way to kick off a long week-end ... 71 minutes to a max depth of 79 fsw.
Here's a couple of my pics from the dive ...
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
