Under the Alki waters

From my 2005 dive adventures:

I spent all day Saturday underwater (well, it felt like it) up in Mukilteo and then another dive down on Alki Beach because I missed the first dive in Mukilteo because I forgot my fins. The truly sad thing about that situation is that I didn’t realize that I’d forgotten my fins until AFTER suiting up with the thin suit, two layers of wetsuit, and boots. Luckily I hadn’t put the hood on yet or my day would have been ruined (the neoprene hood is the destroyer of hair and earrings, and I have yet to wear it without getting large amounts of hair painfully caught in the velcro. Scuba will make me bald someday). I ran over to the Edmonds dive shop to rent some stylish foot-gear (they were turquoise!), and met up with the group for dive #2 but that meant that I had an extra tank of air and I could not in good conscience return that to the shop full. Another diver who I’d just met that day was up for an adventure, and had been telling me about Cove 2 in Alki and how beautiful it was so I cajoled him into coming with me for an added dive.

We didn’t get into the water until after 4 in the afternoon, and it was cold and raining and our wetsuits were already damp and disgusting from the Mukilteo dive. Once we were in the water, though, it was gorgeous! The clearest I’ve ever seen locally, and there was all sorts of interesting wreckage down there. The light was somehow brighter underwater than up on the cloudy surface, and we startled clouds of shrimp and saw more crabs than I’d ever seen. We swam out to the wreck of the HoneyBear (I don’t know what kind of boat it was, but there were very tall masts and lots of crates and such thrown around) and peeked under the hull to say hello to the resident GIANT OCTOPUS (He didn’t tell me about this part beforehand. He made a kind of octopus-y hand gesture underwater but I though he was talking about jellyfish). We rested on our knees on the sandy bottom and he shined my dive light into a small crevice. I peeked in, expecting maybe a fish or a nice urchin (who doesn’t love a nice urchin?), and came face-to-tentacle with an octopus with suckers over 3″ in diameter. I am not sure what part I was inches away from, but after a couple seconds of frozen-ness on my part, it opened like a giant mouth and exposed a foot-long swath of bright white inner-octopus waviness (I’m guessing it was its gill or something). I jumped a mile and scampered backwards, kicking up sediment and breathing more bubbles than I had the entire dive previously. He tried to give me the light and let me view closer, but I graciously let him stick his face near the suckers and instead hovered a few feet away, looking at the hole side-eye in case the thing decided to attack and strangle all of us with its mile long tentacles of death.

After that I needed some release, and we had plenty of air left (it ended up being an almost hour-long dive!) so we played around, swooping over and under the masts, which were covered by a thick skin of white sea anenomes that hid tiny crabs and mini schools of fish. My buddy crossed his arms over each other with his elbows pointing out, which is very close to the “I’m freezing and have to go to the surface” signal, which made me start to swim his direction (he was pretty far away). But then he turned and swam fast after a bunch of larger fish who had just passed us by and suddenly I saw that he was in fact playing a modified version of “shark” and trying to eat them with his elbows. Of course I realized this immediately after I was hanging upside down trying to high-five crabs (they rest with their claws down and a couple back legs hanging up in the water, so this isn’t as hard as one might think) so it all worked out all right.

Those scuba divers are some strange folks.