covediver
Contributor
One nice thing about diving in the Last Frontier is that we can make night dives at nine in the morning. With the approach to Winter Solstice, we are down to about 5 1/2 hours of daylight. As is the tradition with many of my dive buddies, we try to make a dive around the shortest day of the year. I went through the 8:40 a.m. tunnel to Whittier after climbing into my drysuit at the restrooms while waiting for the tunnel to open. There were lots of divers that day, surprising for this late in December when people are busy getting ready for the holidays or leaving the state to visit others for the holidays. I arrived at the dive site at Smitty's cove just before 9:00 am to find my buddies Jerry and Lisa geared up and ready to go. I quickly donned all my gear and we headed down the ramp into the water. It was still dark as the sun had not risen. Air temp was about 36, water temp was about 39. Diving mid morning is a much more civilized time to make a night dive....Vis was about 40 feet. We did two dives; getting down to about 80 feet on both. The dives were fishy, lots of wolf eels, ling cod, kelp greenling, decorator crabs, and a moon jelly. Great dives.