Did my first dives on Sekiu Jetty this past Saturday. Cheng and I were joined by our friend Janet, who lives in Port Angeles, for a pair of dives.
I love this dive site. There’s ample (free) parking, nice facilities nearby, and relatively easy entry. It’s a very shallow dive that starts out in eel grass, progresses through dense kelp, and ends up at a series of large rocks. Each habitat offers a unique environment … providing different things to see throughout the dive.
We started out surface-swimming straight out from the center of the beach … through the “sand flats”. The bottom slopes off from the beach fairly suddenly, but then if flattens out at 12-15 feet for quite a ways out. After a couple of minutes of kicking, I looked down to get a feel for how deep we were and was surprised to see that the water was full of tiny jellyfish.
“We’re dropping down right here”, I told my dive buddies … as I unclipped my camera. There were at least five or six different species swimming around, including these long, slinky things that I later found out were some kind of colonial salp … they looked like a translucent pearl necklace slinking around in the water. Sadly, they proved difficult to take pictures of, as my camera didn’t understand what I was asking it to focus on. In the first few minutes of the dive, I found two or three species of jellies that I had never seen before, including a type of segmented worm called a “tomopterid” … I later found out it’s a deep-water pelagic species … what in the world is it doing here, in 23 feet of water?
One of the most interesting things we found in the eelgrass was something called a “stalked medusa”. Not sure if it’s a jellyfish or an anemone … or something else altogether … but there’s a couple of pictures of them in the photo show.
In among the kelp were tons of black, copper, quillback, and canary rockfish … as well as ling cod and various other species common to the Puget Sound area. Kelp and decorator crabs were also pretty common, as were several varieties of snails. We found several large yellow patches of some sort of encrusting sponge that seemed to attract them.
But the rocks were the best … they were totally covered in riotous color, reminding me very much of my recent trip to Monterey CA. Urticina anemones were abundant, along with all the shrimp and other types of life they seem to attract. We saw at least a dozen different types of nudibranchs, hydrocorals, strawberry anemones and cup corals, encrusting sponges, and some weird cobalt-blue stuff that looked like little patches of seaweed. It was a painter’s palette of oranges, yellows, reds, and blues everywhere.
Our dives lasted 47 minutes and 62 minutes, respectively. On the second dive, Janet stayed on shore and it was just Cheng and I (with our larger tanks, which allowed us to stay out longer). Our final few moments in the water provided another unique experience … as we entered the “sand flats” in front of the beach I noticed the bottom was literally moving with thousands of tiny crabs … perhaps the size of a common house fly. Then I noticed they were “raining” down from above us, dropping down to the bottom out of the water column … it was downright strange. Capturing one on my glove, it appeared to have a gelatinous appendage … somewhat like a “tail”. I wasn’t aware that crabs went through a larval stage, but that’s exactly what it looked like. Unfortunately, I had filled up my camera’s flash card attempting to take video of the swimming salps we’d seen earlier, so I was unable to get pictures of these fascinating little critters.
At any rate … here’s a photo show. I took about 150 pictures, but there was a lot of floaties in the water so most of them weren’t worth reproducing.
http://photoshow.comcast.net/watch/SR3Yd2hD
I’m going back in seven weeks, with the Emerald Sea Dive Club (we’re doing Neah Bay on Saturday and Sekiu on Sunday). I’m also thinking to put together a camping/diving trip in mid or late September … if any of y’all are interested.
… Bob (Grateful Diver)
if you're not doing it regularly already you should consider doing so!