Not so much at 8 am yesterday, when I left the house in dark drizzle and a temperature in the low 40's. But things improved as I drove south (amazing how much difference a few miles makes in our area, as far as weather goes) and by the time I got to the Point Defiance Marina, there were sun breaks and things were looking generally much more hopeful.
No one else was there, which is a situation sufficiently unfamiliar to my chronically late self that I had one of those, "Oh, my God, am I at the right place on the right day?" moments, but it wasn't long before I saw Richard's truck pull in. I trotted over with my trunk of gear and began unloading on the dock, and got the sad news that Archisgore wasn't going to join us. This was too bad, because it was a perfect day for a beginning boat diver -- nature had cooperated splendidly. But it did make for more room in Water Dawg . . .
Gear and people loaded, we sped (literally, at 25 knots) off to Maury Island. For anyone who doesn't know the site, it consists of two (or possibly three) barges that sank deep to a set of pilings, just offshore from a gravel mine.
The barges are heavily deteriorated, but the remaining structure serves as shelter for a variety of typical Puget Sound critters. For me, this site has been very much hit or miss; I've had dives where every piece of metal had a nudibranch of some kind on it, and others where I searched the whole debris field without finding anything noteworthy. Today was a day of the latter sort, but the viz was quite nice, so I decided to spend the dive playing with wide angle shots, trying to use the ideas from Scott Lundy's workshop. Trying to shoot wide angle in Puget Sound with a 14-42 lens and one strobe is like trying to find a needle in a haystack while blindfolded . . . and the results prove it.
We spent about 50 minutes total in the water, and managed to surface a fair ways from the boat, which was fine, since the surface swim got all of us warmed up a bit. And I then proceeded to have a "personal best" moment, because I got on the boat ALL BY MYSELF, something I've never pulled off with a RIB before.
We swapped tanks, and headed off for the Anna Foss, which turns out to be about a twenty minute, chilly ride when you are wet and the sun is no longer shining. I was really looking forward to this dive, because it was new to me. The Anna Foss is a wooden-hulled tugboat, and is surrounded by the pontoons that were used in salvage attempts. It's fairly deteriorated, but like the Keloken ferry, the wooden hull provides lots of nooks and crannies to shelter critters. I had reviewed the pages on the wreck from Scott Boyd's book, and that was enormously useful in helping me understand what I was seeing. The visibility on this site was not nearly as good as we had had on the barges, and there was a little current, so I stuck to macro shots. For whatever reason, I just didn't have my photo mojo on this dive, so there weren't many good pictures. But I did get this kelp crab, cleaning up the remains of a fat penpoint gunnel:
I took this photo of a painted greenling, which isn't a fantastic photograph, but is noteworthy to me simply because I took it. When I learned to dive, these fish were EVERYWHERE -- I can remember a dive on the barges where we must have seen a hundred or more of them. Even a couple of years ago, when I started taking pictures in earnest, I took lots of painted greenling shots, because they were everywhere and sat still for pictures. Now, finding one was remarkable enough for me to photograph it . . . I wonder what has happened to their populations?
We cut this dive a bit short, both because we had covered the whole wreck, and because we were all cold. Steaming back to Tacoma, we passed a HUGE, immaculate green-and-white tugboat, which quite ironically bore the legend, "Foss". The same company has been operating tugs in the Northwest for over a hundred years; we had seen one of their former stable, and now we were watching her successor.
It was really a lovely day to be diving in Puget Sound. Thank you to Richard and Melody for inviting me!
