At Admiralty beach tire reef I played the game "how many sea quirts can you fit on a tire?". If you want to see sunflower and spiny pink stars on steroids this site is the place to go. The sunflower stars digs holes that are almost 3 feet deep!
The first part of the dive was fun without even current, we expected it after looking at the predictions. I saw a fish that still intrigues me because it may have been a roselip sculpin and I have read that its habitat is usually the open coast and the Strait of Juan de Fuca not Puget Sound area. Unfortunately only the head of the fish was visible, the rest was hidden inside what it looked like an empty giant barnacle shell and I did not have the camera with me because during the second part of the dive I was supposed to practice the deployment of my 6ft SMB.
So let's move on to the second part of the dive. At about 5Oft I tryed to hover few feet above the bottom and inflate that bloody SMB with my corrugated hose and keep holding the spool without entangling myself at the same time. I did manage to put some air in there but my buddy kept telling me that it was not enough. So I did again two more times and by then my air was down to 750PSI.
The SMB went up to the surface and I told my buddy that it was time to go back. So I thought that we were going to practice a vertical ascent following the SMB line (As far as I remembered we agreed on that before getting in the water). Instead my buddy signaled me to follow the bottom. Reluctantly I followed him, he was holding the spool and dragging the SMB. But when I saw that the slope that took us to the bottom was nowhere to be seen and my air was down to 500PSI I gave him the thumb up and he agreed to do the vertical ascent.
So off we went. Everything was OK until we reach 20 feet and we had to stop to do our safety stop. It was then that the buoyancy dance began! From neutral all at sudden became really positive while I kept an eye on the computer (this time I had the computer, and my buddy did not have a depth gauge...) my ascent rate went from slow/normal to fast and with some fiddling back down to normal/slow. The computer safety stop time was all messed up so at some point I thought "screw the safety stop and let's go to the surface!". Anyway we hung in there and finally reached the surface with a decent ascent rate. What a trip!
We then swam back to the beach and retrieved the entangled line and SMB. My pressure gauge was almost down to zero...