Weatherwatch
Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 7:22 am
Weatherwatch is an old deep air training site just north of the alki fishing reef, with an entrance off carroll street:
http://www.scriptkiddie.org/bath/index. ... 15894&z=17
I had wondered for a long time what was south of weatherwatch. It looks like there's an artifact there of ARCinfo combining NOAA deep bathymetry with LIDAR, and I think I proved that it is an artifact and that 30' pinnacle in 60' of water does not exist in reality (the red dot surrounded by yellow). However the bigger finger you can see in the red, yellow, green and blue really does exist. And there's a little wall there. Top of the wall starts around 60' and it is a sandstone wall with a lot of holes in it punched by all the bivalves growing everywhere. Huge fields of them. There were also shrimp, crescent gunnels and probably a bunch of other fish taking up residence there. Quite a few featherduster worms growing on it as well.
After hanging out and taking a bit of video, we tried to find the fishing reef, and after about 25 minutes trigger time of heading into a pretty raging current we gave up and turned the dive.
I can say about this dive that it is quite current sensitive if you don't have the scooters. At one point the current seemed to be going over that finger and plunging down, so we were running a diagonal back into shore while getting blown out and down and not making very fast time at all coming back (even though theoretically we were going with the current). It would have been a whole different experience swimming it.
We found the wall about 3 minutes on the scoots, so probably 12 minutes by swimming south.
Didn't really check to see what was deeper. The wall seemed to peter out around 70-80, but it might pick up below there again...
The rest of the dive was all sand. Weatherwatch is mostly just crazy steep sand that makes you think we're one good earthquake away from losing every house you can see around the divesite. Don't know what keeps the sand there. Flattened out further south, but didn't find any interesting structure, just the odd sea pen being devoured...
http://www.scriptkiddie.org/bath/index. ... 15894&z=17
I had wondered for a long time what was south of weatherwatch. It looks like there's an artifact there of ARCinfo combining NOAA deep bathymetry with LIDAR, and I think I proved that it is an artifact and that 30' pinnacle in 60' of water does not exist in reality (the red dot surrounded by yellow). However the bigger finger you can see in the red, yellow, green and blue really does exist. And there's a little wall there. Top of the wall starts around 60' and it is a sandstone wall with a lot of holes in it punched by all the bivalves growing everywhere. Huge fields of them. There were also shrimp, crescent gunnels and probably a bunch of other fish taking up residence there. Quite a few featherduster worms growing on it as well.
After hanging out and taking a bit of video, we tried to find the fishing reef, and after about 25 minutes trigger time of heading into a pretty raging current we gave up and turned the dive.
I can say about this dive that it is quite current sensitive if you don't have the scooters. At one point the current seemed to be going over that finger and plunging down, so we were running a diagonal back into shore while getting blown out and down and not making very fast time at all coming back (even though theoretically we were going with the current). It would have been a whole different experience swimming it.
We found the wall about 3 minutes on the scoots, so probably 12 minutes by swimming south.
Didn't really check to see what was deeper. The wall seemed to peter out around 70-80, but it might pick up below there again...
The rest of the dive was all sand. Weatherwatch is mostly just crazy steep sand that makes you think we're one good earthquake away from losing every house you can see around the divesite. Don't know what keeps the sand there. Flattened out further south, but didn't find any interesting structure, just the odd sea pen being devoured...