Possession Point Fingers

[Echo]

This morning started off with a humpback whale right off the beach. I've never, in my years of patrolling the Sound, have I ever seen a Humpy here. What a treat it was to have a visual conformation that they are moving back in. No more than 20 min after, a decent sized Dall's porpoise pod came near the beach! Topside sure gave the dives themselves a run for their money! Viz was a poopie 8-5ft. Life seemed pretty void on the first dive, and the second, even with the viz getting poopier, the nudies seemed to be more abundant. Even ran into a Wolf Eel and found some GPOs hidden deep in their dens. The weather held off all day while threatening us periodically. Overall great day on the Island with super awesome folks.

[ScubaJess]

Great pics!!! That's soooo amazing about the whale! I didn't see any at keystone! But did see tons of fish

[Echo]

Randy said that they used to be as abundant as the Grey's here about 100 yrs ago, but the shipping traffic pushed them out. I didn't know that they had ever been South of the San Juans.

[Gdog]

Nice work!

[YellowEye]

Very cool about the humpback. I've heard there are more humpbacks in the SJI's now than orcas. But I still haven't seen any here in the SJI's or PS. Cool!

Nice pics! Hope you're having fun with the camera!

Let's hope for better viz soon!

[Echo]

Yes! I love the camera! It's definitely a major learning curve compared to the p&s. Getting proper strobe angles is work, but enjoying the challenge for sure!

[Echo]

And yes, better viz would be welcomed

[johndo88]

Looks like you all had a great time. I was planning to go but Friday night I developed a sore throat that kept me awake until 2am. When the alarm went off at 5am, there was no way I was getting out of bed on only 3 hours of sleep. %$#@

[Grateful Diver]

Yeah, the humpback was amazing. I got there early, so went for a walk on the beach with my camera, hoping to find some land critters (eagles or such). Got back after about a half-hour and walked up to put my camera back in the car. I had just packed it back in its case, and hadn't even closed the car door yet when I heard the "CHUFF" ... looked up and there it was, maybe 40 feet off the beach. Hurriedly retrieved the camera and headed back to the beach, but the next time it surfaced it was waaaaay out ... too far for a decent shot. Still, it was nice to see it.

The day started out nice ... this was from the ferry on the way to Whidbey ...

https://scontent.fsjc1-3.fna.fbcdn.net/ ... 6424_o.jpg

... and from my beach walk ...

https://scontent.fsjc1-3.fna.fbcdn.net/ ... 8506_o.jpg

Not a whole lot on the underwater shots ... sometimes it's just a swing and a miss ...

.. Bob (Grateful Diver)

[Echo]

I was really hoping your photo would have come through, Bob! You know what they say around here, no pics no proof. Half the reason I got into carrying a camera on me so early in diving. And I agree, life wasn't much last weekend, I usually find a good deal of nudis there, but even they lacked abundance. I've noticed a lot of sites being quite void of life where I'm used to seeing a lot. Maybe I just haven't been diving long enough to catch the ups and downs

[Grateful Diver]

Some of it worries me, Erika ... when I first started diving Redondo regularly you could count on finding a few different species of nudies on every dive. Nowadays you might find one ... or none. Don't really know why ... but there haven't been any "ups" in this cycle, just steady decline ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)