Salt Creek - September 5, 2009!!!

[Seaslave]

My dive buddy Jason and I hauled our families out to Salt Creek Campground this weekend for some end of the summer camping and diving. This was my first time diving at this site and was excited to see how it held up to the reports. We chose to dive at Tongue Point, the stairs were about 50' from our campsites. We entered as the tide was flooding in, late afternoon. Entry was a little tricky, but very managable. We played around in the channels made by the rocks which I thought was very cool. It was like being in a maze and you were trying to find the right way out to the kelp. Lots of crevices and rocks to fing stuff in. Vis was around 40-50ft, similiar to what we've been seeing up in the Northern San Juans. I loved the mild surge, not something we ever get, the sloshing back and forth was fun. Max depth for us was around 40fsw and dive times were over 60 minutes. Didn't see a lot of Rock Fish like I expected. Lots of Perch and Kelp Greenling though. Tons of big anemones and kelp everywhere!!! Believe it or not, we managed to find our entry point without surfacing to peek. The camp ground was very nice and the view was spectacular. I would highly recommend this spot to anyone who likes like shallow macro critter dives and stellar vis!


-Mathue

[BASSMAN]

Cool!
Great pics

[Tom Nic]

Gorgeous!

Another site on my list...

[Dusty2]

Nice report Mathue, That place is like a whole other world from puget sound! As long as the wind is fair (in the right direction) It's an awesome dive site. Glad you did the campground entry. It's way better than the one on the east end.

[Seaslave]

Nice report Mathue, That place is like a whole other world from puget sound! As long as the wind is fair (in the right direction) It's an awesome dive site. Glad you did the campground entry. It's way better than the one on the east end.

We saw a couple of guys come out of there while we were at the playground with our kids. We chatted with them a few minutes. They commented on the difficult entry there but had not dove the other end. The dive didn't sound any different than what we saw though, maybe a little deeper. We walked down there to look at it and decided against diving it. We had a pretty sweet spot where we were at.

[gcbryan]

I agree you picked the best entry. I've done both and while the sites are a little different the difference is not worth the entry in my opinion.

Nice pics!

If you haven't been, Sekiu is even better (to me anyway).

Regarding Rockfish, it probably just wasn't deep enough. I can't remember seeing a lot there. At Sekiu you see a lot of Black and Blue Rockfish at high tide but at lower tides I don't always see them there either.

[CaptnJack]

Nice report Mathue, That place is like a whole other world from puget sound! As long as the wind is fair (in the right direction) It's an awesome dive site. Glad you did the campground entry. It's way better than the one on the east end.

We saw a couple of guys come out of there while we were at the playground with our kids. We chatted with them a few minutes. They commented on the difficult entry there but had not dove the other end. The dive didn't sound any different than what we saw though, maybe a little deeper. We walked down there to look at it and decided against diving it. We had a pretty sweet spot where we were at.

The different entries are all quite similar. I like to swim between the point and the east end out at the edge of the kelp (or reverse depending on while way the water is moving)