The Abrams was a sister ship of the Dixie Arrow, the wreck we visited the day before this dive.  Unfortunately the visibility was not nearly as good, something I’ve been told is typical.  The viz was OK until about 45 feet under, when it deteriorated to perhaps 15 feet at best. With the surge, lack of visibility, metal things to smash against and the presence of large animals, this dive wouldn’t be easy for a beginner, but if you do what you’ve been trained to do - stay oriented, be close to a dive buddy, etc.  it’s not a big deal.  It was my 100th dive, and I’ve dealt with much, much worse, but I couldn’t help but think about how it would have appeared to me a couple of years ago.  A wreck reel would be a good idea here because it will give you a trail of bread crumbs to follow when the viz gets so bad that you can barely see your own fins.  Of course, lines can part, so always try to memorize some landmarks too - or, simply don’t go that far from the anchor; there’s plenty to see.

Above is my favorite shot of the whole trip.  Chuck is hanging on a weighted line dropped from the boat, doing his deco stop at 20 feet, illuminated by scintillating sun rays and accompanied by a sizable barracuda - standard behavior for this fish, which likes to hang out under boats and near divers who are doing their stops.  I used to think that it was the shadow of the boat, or maybe the smaller fish that usually hang out near a floating object, but I’ve been kept company by ‘cudas even when doing stops on drift dives with no boat or lines above, and even in absolute darkness, so I’m not sure what this is about.  I don’t find it threatening; perhaps they figure that I’m there, so I must have my reasons and they should hang out too. If the viz were better, you’d see the debris of the Abrams below Chuck, but the next image will show you what happened as we went through 50 feet of depth:

And it got much worse than that.  Of course, with the sun gone, it became colder too.

Visiting a shipwreck - a real one, not a reef project - is reminiscent of Orpheus’ journey to Hades.  The allegorical sequence of leaving the warmth of topside, surrounded by the happy excited camaraderie of my dive companions, then physically passing through a medium that gradually chokes off color, visual intensity, and temperature, eventually winding up in an inhospitable graveyard haunted by large menacing animals and the constant invisible dangers of diving, hits me over the head with unintentional references to the underworld.  I think that this is a universal experience for divers, even if they cannot articulate it.

Anybody who does this has spent a lot of time and money to do it and must really want to be there, and I am no different.  I am always thrilled to enter the water and fascinated by what I see there.  Returning to the surface, I am usually reluctant to leave the water; but I always have a sense of relief that I’m going back where there are people, sunshine, and laughter.

Coming up the line, we are shadowed by big sand tiger and other sharks ( many larger than me) that stay almost out of visibility, like shady characters following me down a dark city street.  To them, the visibility is not a problem at all; they know exactly where I am and what my visual limitations are.  The currents  that would sweep me away from the anchor line if I let go are no problem for the sharks; their thick bodies ripple with muscle as they casually position themselves just where they wish to be, maintaining a distance of 10-15 feet, right at the edge of the sphere of invisibility created by the darkness and the cloud of fine particles that surround us.  Accompanied by an entourage of smaller animals - each shark is its own ecosystem - they fade in and out of sight, but not awareness. What beauty - how lucky am I to witness this?

There is the intellectual aspect of understanding what has occurred at this spot - the danger, confusion, fear, desperation, bravery, and struggle of the Abram’s crew - as well as the physical evidence of not just an event, but an entire age gone by.  This ship was built not just by people who have passed on, but an entire age that is gone.  The passions, struggles and urgency which with these people lived are now represented only by these things lying on the bottom and our memories of them.  I know that a few survivors of that era are still around, but their numbers grow fewer each day, and they must feel like strangers in a strange land.  As I wandered the remains of the old steam engine, strewn about the bottom, I reflected on how much labor went into the creation of these objects, how the events that led up to their winding up on the bottom were the defining moments of some people’s lives and the end of others (in the case of the Dixie Arrow, people died, but on the Abrams, there were no casualties).  Now, in the summer of 2010, I can casually visit this site for my amusement. I hope that everybody who comes here knows what the place means, or meant, to somebody.  What will I leave for future generations to meditate upon?

Down on the wreck, you are always being watched.

Beautiful, miniature corals strain the water for their living:

Every source of food is exploited; my own body’s protein is mine only by right of strength, or at least intimidation.  The reef would be happy to make me part of it, and it wouldn’t take long.

Here is the whole bunch of images, plus a few extra “detail” shots.

The Dixie Arrow was a US tanker torpedoed by a German U-boat during WWII.  Here is the story, as taken from www.outerbanksdiving.com:

<built> in Camden NJ in 1920 and 1921, <the Dixie Arrow and its sister ship, the F. W.  Abrams>  met their end in 1942 only a few miles apart in the WW II Battle of the Atlantic off the Coast of Hatteras.  The Dixie Arrow was steaming from Texas City, TX, with crude oil when she was torpedoed by  Kapitanleutnant Flachsenberg in U-71 just south of Diamond Shoals on March 26th, 1942.  Despite being engulfed in flames,  the lives of many of the Dixie Arrow’s crew were saved when  ABS Oscar Chappell sacrificed his own life manning the helm of the crippled tanker to turn the ship and steer the flames away from the survivors gathered on the ship’s bow.  All tolled, eleven died  and twenty-two survived the sinking.  <… stuff removed> Today both ships lie in about 90 feet of water less than six miles apart.  The Dixie Arrow is better preserved:  The shape of her bow and stern are easily identified–with high relief in the bow section rising twenty-five feet from the ocean floor.  Both wrecks are regularly visited by large rough-tail and southern sting-rays, sand tigers, and huge atlantic barracuda.

So this is a storied wreck and also it hosts great clouds of life.  I was trying out a new camera and the pictures are kinda crappy, but here they are.  The most notable thing were the large number of robust, muscular sand tiger sharks, many of which were larger than us. At first glance you may think that it is scary to be around such large animals; indeed, they are kind of alarming, because of their numbers, size, muscularity, and how their mounths are formed into a permanent goofy grin of protruding sharp teeth.  But they treated us with a laissez-faire attitude.  I knew that they knew I was there, but I could also tell that I didn’t look like food.  At that moment, anyway…

Another thing to consider is that their mouths are not meant for eating large prey.  They don’t have a particularly nasty reputation for attacking humans, although it does happen occasionally.  Here you can see the relative sizes of man and beast; if anything, the size of this shark has been de-emphasized, because it’s farther away than the diver (who happens to be Chuck of Columbia Scuba).

Other large predators inhabit the vicinity, such as these 3 and 4 foot-long barracudas.

Above is a shot of the tanker’s giant steam engine surrounded by a great cloud of life. The engine is beautifully exposed, and you can see the crankshaft and boilers when diving (although not in this particular image).

Divers may be interested to know that in the summer, the water here is very warm.  The Gulf Stream makes a close approach to land here, and this wreck, being about 20 miles offshore, lies within it.  I wore  a 3-mil suit; the water temperatures were almost 80, avan at depth. There is a one-hour+ boat ride involved; the water has a reputation for being rough and you never know what you will find.  It was something of a challenge this day, and some people puked, but overall the weather was gorgeous.

The town of Hatteras is well-known as a tourist attraction and I won’t go into any detail describing it, except to say that there is at least one good dive shop here (mentioned above)  that dispenses nitrox, and there are numerous restaurants, quaint inns, and beautiful beaches.

It also has mosquitoes, and plenty of them.  Since I’m outside having my blood drained by mosquitos in order to be near a hot spot to make this post, I’m just going to slap in the rest of today’s photos without comment:

My last day of diving this week was a Thursday with threatening weather out of the south.  I decided to dive the BHB (Blue Heron Bridge, see here and here) solo, and stay on the east side in 20 feet of water.  There weren’t too many people there.  I decided to work the east side under the low bridge, because of the wrecks underneath the bridge and all of the animals that can be found within.  I’d heard something about seahorses, and hoped to find some myself.

I entered the water about 20 minutes before slack high tide, which was 2:12 PM. Now that’s an easy schedule!  For some reason the board near the water’s edge had a high tide time of 2:30 posted; check some tables if you’re making plans.  The water temperature was 72, air temp about the same.  Using a 3mm suit and a hood, it was doable, but I was pushing it. Visibility was about 20″, but when the current changed at the end of my dive - about an hour and 15 minutes later - the vis dropped to less than 10 feet over less than five minutes.

A lot of the best photo opportunities can be found in the shallow sand leading up to the channel under the bridge, in only 8-12 feet of water, just where the slope rolls off into the 20″ region.  You are supposed to tow one of those damned surface markers here, and I did - but none of the 10 other divers that I saw were using one.  WTF?  It’s a pain to tow one because they can get tangled with fishing lines from people fishing off of the bridge, and it is one more thing to handle when you’ve got a camera.  Between handling the float, the camera, standard dive safety things, trying not to blunder into other divers in the murk and sometimes low vizibility, and remembering not to dive near the swimming beach - there’s a lot to keep in mind here.  Luckily, it’s so shallow, and so close to shore, that it doesn’t strike me as a particularly dangerous place to dive.

First, as always around BHB, the ubiquitous arrow crab.

Juvenile Gray Angelfish.  This animal will grow up to have a very different coloration; see the animal in the background in this image.

Flounders are miraculous creatures.  They are invisible until they move, and then they are graceful as they swim with a rippling motion.  This”eyed” flounder - funny name, given that they all have eyes - is almost undetectable, blending in with the sand and broken shells on the bottom.

Under the bridge it is like a spooky underworld cathedral.  The bridge’s columns march into obscure distance and indistinct blue light.  Although it is the Lake Worth lagoon - a stretch of sea water protected by a barrier island, and fed by fresh water too from a number of sources - it might as well be the river Styx.  The bodies of several small sailboats lie under the bridge, swathed in continual gloom and watched over by large schools of spadefish.  The schools can be so large that on occasion, as they flow around you, it can be disorienting, like flying through a flock of mirrors.  The presence of a large school appearing out of the misty darkness can be a little frightening, as it first seems to be the body of an enormous animal.  The bottom, particularly under the wrecks, teems with otherworldly life.  A five-foot southern stingray, looking like a fleshy stealth fighter, rippled from the nothingness beyond my line of sight and, upon seeing me, spun on its axis and disappeared into the haze, followed by a retinue of remoras.  Had it been a vision?  I knelt on the bottom and stared at the activity, awed and soaking in the spiritual moment.  Photography was superfluous.  Overhead, cars rumbled over the bridge, oblivious to the world below.

A bright plastic object - a fishing lure - distracted me.  Surrounded by a cloud of fish, it was being gigged up and down by its owner 25 feet overhead on the bridge sidewalk.  The fish were nibbling at the attached piece of squid, getting some meat but not taking the hook.  The fisherman had no idea what he was up against; a small army of animals with miniature tweezer mouths and lighting reaction times.  I was having trouble seeing it - and it was only 5 feet away; I was also shivering.  Time to go back!  Total dive time: 72 minutes, and only 1/2 of my air consumed.

Another day, another dive.  I bought a seat on a “cattle boat” but it was a well-run cattle boat.  The weather was perfect, the water calm.  Today I learned my lower tolerance limit for a 3MM wetsuit - the water was about 73, which was OK for the first dive, but by the end of the second I was shivering.  It was just manageable, but I would have preferred using a heavier wetsuit or better yet, a dry suit.  The hood I used was a big help, as were th neoprene socks under my dive boots.  Everyone’s personal thermostat is set differently though; in my group there were a few dry suits, and a guy wearing a shortie!

The water is turbid at this time of year; you have to get right on top of animals to photograph them.  The limited visibility and current can be a little much for some novice divers; you have to be prepared for the spookiness of such conditions.  It is easy to get separated and lose sight of other divers.  Carrying a surface marker with a reel is mandatory, in my opinion (many dive operators require this too).

Scrawled cowfish, one of the most beautiful fish in the ocean.  I’ve seen them many times in Florida and in Cozumel.

Another scrawled cowfish, showing some color variation.

A spotted moray, Gymnothorax moringa, with an arrow crab in the background.

Check out those tubed nostrils.  I wonder if they help the eel discern the directions of scents?  Morays are supposed to have an excellent sense of smell.

A blue angelfish.

Yellowhead wrasse, terminal phase.  Many fish go through phases of develoment in which they take on radically varying appearances.  Until DNA analysis, observers thought that the juvenile and mature phases of some fish were different species.  Some fish have not only juvenile/mature phases, but other phases in between, where the fish might change sex.

Spanish hogfish.

An juvenile cocoa damselfish, about 3 inches long.

Harlequin bass

Brilliant yellow sponge.

Today I hooked up with a great guy I met on Scuba board.  Joe brought his friend (relative?) Lev and we all went in together.  Joe was kind enough to loan me a cylinder and some weights, the only things I don’t travel with.  Joe is clearly an old hand at the bridge and scuba, so was a natural dive leader.  For 75 minutes we dove the west side in water that never exceeded 13 feet and was a tolerable 74 degrees.  After all that time, I’d consumed only 1600 PSI of air (about half a tank).  That’s another wonderful thing about this site - endless bottom time, little danger.

The ocean has been disturbed by wind lately, so the vis was kind of bad.  You can see how many particles are in the water; it was only possible to take photos of things that were very close to the camera.  Some animals don’t like that!

I’ve written about BHB (as it’s known locally) once before because I dived there last year.  BHB is one of the easiest and most rewarding dive sites in this region.  It’s underneath a bridge on the east end of West Palm Beach.  There is a park - Phil Foster park - there, with bathrooms and showers.  Nothing could be simpler.  Dive up, park your car, gear up on a picnic table, and wade in.  There are only two gotchas:

1) Everyone else thinks that BB is great too.  There’s nothing like diving with, say, 200 of your fellow divers.

2) It’s only good for diving at slack high tide - the period just after high tide has finished coming in when the water i fairly still.  Otherwise, there is too much silt from the fresh water draining into the sea, and the visibility will be terrible.  Not to mention the current, which will carry you away.

To deal with these issues, we went on a Monday afternoon 20 minutes prior to slack high tide.

Here are the resulting photos:

This barred blenny is only about one inch long and is like a little fairy, because it has tiny little “antennas” (called cirri) and it pops in and out of hiding holes.  It’s adorable and fun to watch.  It will swivel its eyes paranoically at you and then instantly disappear, although the cirri will sometimes stick out of its hole.

This seaweed blenny reminds me of the dramatic gopher:

Red-tipped fireworm

Bearded fireworm.  I don’t know if they’re named “fireworms” because they are colored so brightly, or because they can sting (both are true).

Small yellow stingray, family Urolophidae

Crabs mating (blotched swimming cabs).  If disturbed, they will scuttle away together, locked in position.

One of the arrow crabs that are so abundant in this area.

A sharpnose puffer runs away; a gray angelfish is in the background.

I finally caught up with that sharpnose puffer, although it’s still pointed away from me…

A lantern bass;  it resembles a tiny grouper.

I kid you not, this juvenile wrasse is called a “slippery dick,” Halichoeres bivittatus.

I’m doing something I’ve never really done before, which is take off on a vacation with almost no plans.  I bought plane tickets to Florida, packed my dive gear, and went.  Until 24 hours before I left, I wasn’t even sure where I was going exactly!

I ended up near Jupiter, which is north of Ft. Lauderdale.  There is some good drift diving here, and lots of dive operators that go out frequently enough to make unplanned diving possible.  I called the night before I left and got myself a seat on a boat, a rental car, and a cheap hotel.

I got up at 5AM, flew to Ft. Lauderdale, drove an hour north to West Palm Beach, and jumped on a dive boat.  We got in a two-tank dive and I drove back to the hotel, exhausted.  The TV in the lobby announced that the space shuttle was launching at 7:43.  Looking at my watch, I saw that is was… 7:38!  Holy crap!

I ran out in the parking lot with a compass, oriented myself, and waited.  Sure enough, there it was.  I could actually hear it above the traffic, even though it’s a two-hour drive north of where I am.  And of course this was the one trip when I didn’t bring a good camera!

From a new york times article published tonight:

“I’ve seen a lot of launches,” said Michael D. Leinbach, the shuttle launching director. “This was the most visibly beautiful launch I’ve ever seen.”

This mission will deliver solar arrays and a toilet to the space station.

OK, now for the dive pictures.

This was cool - at atlantic guitarfish, which is uncommon.  It’s about 3 feet long, so it’s about as large as they get, according to the definitive ID Guide.  However, the Denver aquarium has one tha looks like it’s about 7 feet long; maybe it’s another species.

Next comes this disturbingly phallic sponge:

An obligatory green moray eel picture:

Some christmas tree worms on a brain coral:

And finally this object, which I had to stare at for a few seconds before I realized what it was:

Just a clue: it was 6 feet from nose to tail, and here’s its face, buried in the sand:

Eventually my presence disturbed this southern stingray, and it rose from the sand like a UFO and rippled away.

A few comments on the dive.  This was a little challenging because of an “instabuddy” and a sloppy dive operator.  The dive operation has a very good reputation, and I’m sure everyone has bad days - and it wasn’t all their fault, because if I’d had a regular diving buddy, the dive would have been different also.

My dive buddy, X, hadn’t been diving for a few years and was rusty.  There were about 12 of us waiting for the boat, and the weather was ominous.  The wind had picked up to an alarming level and even in the protected sound of west palm beach there were whitecaps. I checked to make sure I was carrying a barf bag.  Everyone else was thinking the same thing; an unenthusiastic, grim set of divers greeted the boat as it pulled up to the dock; it was fighting the wind with great difficulty.  It looked like we were going to search for a body instead of to have some fun!  As it turned out, nobody got really ill, although it was kind of rough.  The reefs here are very close to the shore and it’s a mercifully short ride, maybe 25 minutes.

So X and I entered the water.  Right away I could see X struggling to sink; X was under weighted.  Then X tried to empty X’s BCD but didn’t know how to operate it.  I aborted the dive and we got back on the boat after being in the water for 2 minutes; the 4-foot waves and chop were no place to figure things out.  We got it straightened out with the help of a very patient dive master, and tried again.  This time, we made it to the bottom, but since we were by ourselves, we had to make sure to keep a good compass heading to not get too far away from the boat’s path.  X kept swimming in the wrong direction, or maybe it was just my paranoia that X didn’t seem focused on keeping a heading.  I couldn’t really enjoy my dive as I had to keep following X and pointing out the right direction.  10 minutes into the dive, my dive computer flooded.  I decided to keep going, as I also had a watch on and it my first dive of the day; I’d just use dive tables instead.  Prior to entering the water, I had checked tables so that I knew how much bottom time I could get, in case this happened.  No problem.

X had a high air consumption rate and we had to surface while I had 1600 pounds left (that’s at least 10 minutes of dive time out of what could have been a 40 minute dive).  Then, as I shot my surface marker from the bottom, X swam over it, momentarily became entangled, and then rushed to the surface where X used my surface marker like a life raft while I did my safety stop.  X also got a nice mask hickey by not equalizing properly.

Yet X was too nice and apologetic to allow me to be annoyed for long.  I also have done boneheaded things while diving.  I’ve been lucky, sometimes, to have more experienced people help me learn without making me feel stupid.  I thought about how this had made the world a better and safer place and tried to emulate those people, explaining what could be done next time, without shame or iritation.  I think it worked.  After our surface interval, we were ready to go in again, all psyched to do things properly.

But now, the boat crew messed up.  They told her to jump, and then while she was in the water, the boat sped away from her while I watched helplessly.  To compound matters, they shouted for her to submerge, instead of waiting on the surface for me.  By the time they let me jump in, I was too far away to find her.  Perhaps I should have refused; it occurred to me.  I tried to find with the dive master, but he disappeared in the heavy current and low visibility (or I totally misunderstood the simple dive plan).

Annoyed, I realized that this had become a solo dive.  I was more worried about X than myself.  I hung around watching the giant stingray for a little while, and then shot my surface marker.  It was on the surface during the 10 minutes of my ascent and safety stop, yet when I surfaced, I could see the boat a half mile away.  There it remained for 15 minutes, occasionally visible as the 4-foot chop carried me to a crest.  Later, I learned that it was because some divers wound up near the shipping channel and had to be rescued.

Now I don’t really blame X.  This was a dive operater of the type that caters to “diving for fun” and I think they were careless with an obviously inexperienced diver.  They didn’t try to evaluate her beforehand and decide how much watching she needed, and didn’t respond to clues that she needed such watching.  Because of this, I felt that my safety was a little compromised.  I was prepared to take care of myself, and I did, but it made me think.

It made me think about how even before I got to the shop, there were some disconnects - they had no sign, and were hard to find, and didn’t seem to be able to give me directions.  Other divers were also uninformed about the sign-in proceedure.  The dive operator didn’t see fit to mention that the shop shares space with an almost unrelated business, so that even when I found it and walked in, I wasn’t sure if I was in the right place.  It made me think about how they delivered my EAN 36 without offering to analyze it, and I had to ask where the analyzer was.  I almost didn’t get on the boat then, and that was before all this stuff with X happened.  Which makes me wonder if I should be more picky, and draw the line faster and more judgementally than I did.  I can usually trust myself, but if the boat is sloppy, my buddy is inexperienced, and then I make a mistake, bad things could happen to somebody.  Accidents often happen when many things go wrong; why take so many chances?  I won’t be using them again soon, although they were friendly and earnest enough.

Vancouver Island is one of the best places in the world for cold water diving, so I was determined to dive as much as possible during my visit.  As it turned out, I was only able to dive on a single occasion.  I met some great scuba people though.

I don’t dive alone, specially in a strange place.  When diving, if I am by myself I always try to find someone on the internet and try to get a feel for what they’re like before diving with them.  So, before I left Maryland I hit the internet and searched for someone to dive with.  As luck would have it, scubaboard’s buddy matrix turned up Mike Lee, an instructor with Beaver Aquatics in Campbell River.  Mike is the nicest guy - always has a good word and is very “with it.”  He leads shore dives every Sunday, usually on Quadra Island.  I learned a lot from diving with him.

Being only an occasional cold water diver, I don’t own a dry suit and had to rent one.  Beaver Aquatics doesn’t rent them - hardly any shops do - but fortunately for me, UB diving right in downtown Courtenay is one of the few that does.  The shop is owned and operated by Sean Smyrichinsky and his wife Shelley.  They have had a diving operation in the area for years, although this particular shop is new.  The dry suit, an Aqualung Blizzard, was almost brand new and in fantastic shape.  My previous experience (at another shop stateside) renting a dry suit wasn’t that great, but a good suit changed everything.  Sean and his wife are friendly, accessible, and full of good advice.  He was kind enough to accommodate my difficult schedule and let me look over his shoulder while he serviced my regulator (for a free-flow problem that I might have not noticed, without his experience).  Although I didn’t dive with UB this time, I wouldn’t hesitate to do so next time.  I also learned a lot from watching Sean work on my equipment.

The weather was not the best for diving when I was there - choppy seas and high winds, not to mention snow!  See this post for some images of the bad weather that canceled some of our earlier dives.  But finally, weather and work allowed a brief opportunity to get in the water.

Not that the weather was ideal.  Here are some (crappy) images of the beach at Mould’s bay. Water temperature: about 8C (46F).  Air temperature: don’t know, but it was alternately raining and snowing.

This is a great place for training because the easy beach entry leads to a gently sloping shallow bay with a well-defined mouth.  Divers have an opportunity to collect themselves after entering the water and hang out in the 5-10′ water, if need be, in order to practice skills.  At the bay’s mouth there are some rocks that mark a deflection point where the sea floor slopes away more rapidly.  The rocks form a cliff face that seems to get covered in sand at 80′ or so.  Max depth for me was 70′.  The cliff has lots of nooks and crannies for creatures to live in.  It wasn’t exactly covered with life, but there were the usual Pacific Northwest anemones, clams, sea cucumbers, sea stars, lingcod and sculpins.  But the real prize for me was seeing a wolf eel.  It didn’t want to come out and play.  This guy habitually hands out in a crevice about 40′ to the left of the bay’s mouth at a depth of 50′ or so.  There is a small piece of fishing pole stuck into the rocks to mark its lair.

The water was dim and full of particulates, with a green cast - although the viz was pretty good - maybe 80 feet.  Particles, surge and my inexperience with the dry suit and BC made for some poor photographic conditions.  It was my first dive with a Dive-Rite wing style BC; I had none of the problems staying upright at the surface that some people report.  This BC is so comfortable, I will never look back!  Humping my tank over the beach is no problem now.  But since I was unfamiliar with the equipment I didn’t take my camera on the first dive, and on the second dive the surge made it difficult to stay in position in order to take the picture.  Win some, lose some.

Sea cucumbers

This type of anemone is common throughout the Pacific Northwest.  When I see them in the wild they are usually red:

although this specimen in the Vancouver aquarium was bright green, perhaps from symbiotic algae, or maybe I’m mistaken and it’s not the same animal:

The water had been calm when we entered, but by the end of our second dive things were a little worse.  After we surfaced, a vicious riptide dragged us inexorably towards the teeth of surf crashing on rocks.  We had to drop to the shallow bottom (10′) and crawl all the way to shore.

As I stumbled to shore, the ocean had a final jab at me, catching me from behind with a wave that knocked me flat on my face.  I could hear a cold rain pelting down around me and the wind had picked up.  My camera got crushed between my (and all of my diving lead) and the rocks, cracking a trim piece.  Respect the sea!

Here’s a few images of the weather conditions up here.  The snow is worse than it’s been in decades.  The water temperature is around 8C (46F).  The air temperature is 0C (32F), plus or minus a degree or two.  It alternately rains and snows, and the 40-70 knot winds whip the waves into a frenzy of streaking, foaming rollers, depositing a layer of salt foam on the beach.  If I jump and spread my arms, I get carried a few inches by the wind.

I got up early and drove to the dive shop, but we decided to call it.  Obviously!  Not really safe.  Or fun, in those conditions.

Because I get to Whidbey Island on a regular basis, I’ve been diving there. The primary salient fact about the water there is that it’s ball-shrinking cold! I dove there in the summer once, and the water temperature was 48 F. I dove it in a wet suit, and have been dumb enough to do it several times over the years. My latest trip was In November, and it pushed me over the edge - really, is diving in the Puget Sound in November in a wet suit reasonable? I think not. Plus, this was on the heels of a trip to Cozumel, where the water temperature at 90 feet was 86 F. I just couldn’t bear it again, I thought I might crack like an untempered piece of glass. So, it was dry suit time.

But first, what did I see down there? Here are a few images.

This is a sunflower star (Pycnopodia helianthoides) showing how these animals can have various colors, the complex texture of their bodies, and the remarkable tube feet. Each tube foot has a little suction cup. unlike many sea stars, this variety lives fast enough for you to see it move. The tube feet slowly quest about as the animal “walks” over the sea floor. If you pick up one of these guys, they can stick to you pretty well! Their top sides are a complex world of structures ( pedicellariae and papulae) which act like velcro, so if you touch that side, you will also stick somewhat. I wouldn’t touch one bare-handed. One thing I can guarantee to you, is that if you dive anywhere in the pacific northwest, you will see one of these things. They are as common as rocks, and thus often overlooked, but they are amazing. The typical specimen shown in the center below looks like the coals of a dying fire.

You will also find plenty of crabs in the area, but some of them are well camouflaged, like this one, which I almost missed. It was wedged into place and making a living by picking plankton out of the water with tiny little limbs in between its eyes. It was fascinating to watch it stabbing out with those miniature pincers, grabbing the almost invisible specks floating by. It was very busy and never ceased.

For images taken at Keystone Ferry jetty, look here.

Of course, there are interesting animals on the surface. I didn’t have my “good” camera, so I couldn’t get a good image of these two young bald eagles. For more pictures of northwest animals, see here, here and here.

OK, back to the story.

I called up Pat at the Whidbey Island Dive Center and got myself into a dry suit class with diver extraordinaire Pete Pehl. Pete is a retired U.S. Navy diver who started out wearing one of these. Now he’s a bit more modern, and he “learned me good.” The final part of my dry suit training (which only took two days) was an open-water dive from the beach at Admiralty bay. This is an area near the Keystone ferry site, but a little further south.

If you have dived at keystone ferry - one of the better sites on Whidbey Island - you’ll probably have noticed the cobbly bottom stretching away to the south, and probably not spent much time exploring it because the Keystone Jetty is so much more interesting. This reasoning is sound. If you dive the almost featureless cobble bottom off of admiralty beach, you won’t be overwhelmed with the scenery. It is good to do it just to know what’s going on under the water, and you may find something that I didn’t. And of course, maybe November isn’t the best time. But the water was clear, the current slack, and the weather fair. It doesn’t get much better than these conditions in November. Air temperature in the mid fifties and a water surface temperature of 48 F.

After water entry, you’ll find that the bottom follows a steep grade over a couple of dozen yards until it bottoms out at about 60 feet (at slack high tide). The grade is so regular it appears to be man made, although I don’t think that this is the case. The bottom composition is exactly the same as the beach - 3-inch or smaller diameter stones, accompanied by the occasional log, small tire reef, discarded toilet, the standard assortment of garbage, and of course (since it’s the pacific northwest) seaweed detritus (although no seaweed forest). All of it is covered with fine silt that can screw up local visibility if stirred up by bottom-crawling divers.

We saw the usual assortment of sculpin, cod, crabs and a small octopus inside the toilet, although there wasn’t that much life. I was too cold to enjoy it. The bottom temperature was 46 F. Despite the dry suit underwear and three pairs of socks, it was fuh fuh fuh freezin’. After 15 minutes I couldn’t feel my toes at all. At 25 minutes I was flexing my fingers constantly to maintain some feeling. When we surfaced at 35 minutes, I had a hard time walking on the slippery cobble surface because I might as well have been a double amputee wearing wooden legs; I had no sensation even though I was mostly dry.

So you might get the impression that I didn’t like it. This is far from true! It was a hardship though. I would like to use better equipment next time, and perhaps choose a dive site that’s a little more worth the trouble. Better equipment would have made me more comfortable. But this dive was my dry suit cert dive, so it’s all good. It was an easy dive, surfacing is simple because you simply follow the slope back up to the top. I was even able to get a few images, and spent some time in the good company of Mr. Pehl. So I can’t complain!

Some time ago I posted a short essay on fish feces, and mentioned the role of parrot fish and similar animals in generating sand. I hadn’t been able to get this on film, despite having witnessed it many times. Well, on a recent diving trip to Cozumel, I finally got it!

Yes, I’ve spent thousands of dollars on a vacation, equipment, diving classes, and endured the rigors of scuba, just so I can take pictures of fish taking a dump. Everyone’s gotta have a reason for getting up in the morning.

Here is an image of two parrotfish at a cleaning station. I think they are both stoplight parrotfish On the left is a stoplight parrotfish, I’m not sure about the ID of the guy on the right.  At first I thought they were the same type of animal - many fish can look radically different, assuming varying colorations at will and in different phases of their lives (or at day/night). But they have different tails and “beaks” so I think they are different kinds of parrotfish.  I just couldn’t find an exact match in any of my books.

They are in a classic cleaning pose: floating motionlessly with heads up, bodies straight, jaws relaxed and slightly open. You can see the little yellow cleaners (initial phase bluehead wrasse, probably) darting about the larger animals. The inset is an ocean surgeonfish in the act of defecating. You can see that the turd is basically sand. That’s because these animals graze algae that grows on sand and coral, and end up eating some of the coral. It gets ground up in their gizzards and eventually excreted. Parrotfish and surgeonfish are similar in this regard.  I love those ocean surgeonfish, with eyes like psychedelic canceled stamps.

Parotfish crapping sand

By the way, the original essay was part of the admission process for becoming a volunteer at the Baltimore Aquarium. I was accepted as a diver! So now I’ll be diving there regularly - feeding animals, scrubbing algae and talking with visitors.