Weekend Dive Report

Dive Report for Saturday and Sunday, Day Island and Titlow.

Saturday we met at 1pm for a dive at Day Island wall. While we were suiting up, rather quietly since this is a residential area I made the mistake of smiling and saying "hello, how are you" to the home owner next to the public access. He stared me down and shouted "You know your not welcome here". We then tried to ignore him as he continued to complain that we were there. I wont be saying hi to him again.
We got in the water around 20 of 2. The current near shore and even at the wall was already moving south. Were we late? I don't know, it seems like there is a back eddy going on here. We slowly drifted with the current spotting many octopus and wolf eel. We got about half way down and decided to swim back along the top of the wall. Katrina stopped to take many pictures. I found a nice Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker a couple of feet away from the top of the wall. He was just sitting on a rock. It always makes the dive to see these little cute fish.
The vis was about 15 feet. Not great but good enough. It was like night at the bottom of the wall at 90'. The water was a cold 47 degrees.
Members of the Marker Buoy Dive club arrived just as we put our gear on. We chatted for a while but had to get in the water since the gear was getting heavy. They were just swimming out as we were coming in. I wonder if they had better timing than we did.

Sunday we dove Titlow. Again the current was moving south. Slack was predicted for 3pm. There must be a back eddy here as well or the water started flooding before 3pm. Either way it was only a 1/4 knot or so. The neat thing we saw on this dive was a big dead skate being eaten by giant sunflower starfish. You don't see that every day. We started at a couple of pilings to the south of the main group. There are some small ledges here with wolfeels. Then we swam to the north. We check out all the pilings from the old dock. We saw a couple of Decorated War bonnets in a big old barnacle shell. Other than that there was not a lot going on. The water was very cold. My hands were hurting. Time for new liners for the dry gloves.

Jeff
http://www.seanet.com/~katrinakruse/

jeffkruse2000:

Dive Report for Saturday and Sunday, Day Island and Titlow.

Saturday we met at 1pm for a dive at Day Island wall. While we were suiting up, rather quietly since this is a residential area I made the mistake of smiling and saying "hello, how are you" to the home owner next to the public access. He stared me down and shouted "You know your not welcome here". We then tried to ignore him as he continued to complain that we were there. I wont be saying hi to him again.

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Yeah, I had a run-in with that guy the last time I dove the Day Island Wall. I made the mistake of parking in front of his house, a little too close to his car (I did not know about this guy at the time). He was standing around in the middle of the street in front of my car when we came up from the dive. I said hello to him, and he proceeded to lay into me for being too close to his car. I did apologize profusely and moved my car as soon as I got my bp/wing off, I don't think he was thankful though.

I would suggest that anyone diving at Day Island Wall not park in front of the house to the right of the beach entry (looking at the water). Anything we can do to not give this guy a legitimate reason to complain is probably a good thing.

FWIW, Day Island Wall is an awesome dive. It is easily my most favorite dive spot in the Sound to date. What current station did you use to predict slack, Jeff? The folks I know (and now I do, as well) use Gipson Point with no corrections with great success. For example, looking at last Saturday I have SBF at 2:51 pm.

Jimmie

We use slack at the Narrows. We use the black tide logs and use the prediction for Tacoma Narrows. Saturdays slack was predicted for 2:30. That's about the time we got out of the water. Like I said the current was only 1/4 of a knot so it wasn't hard to swim against. Any more current though and it would have been a different story.

So, when we entered the water at 1:40 the current on the shore AND wall was going South. But the current should have been ebbing. I would think a ebbing current should head North. Am I wrong? Is there always a counter current here?

At the end of the dive when the current should have started to flood I would think the current should have been pushing us South. It was not. We were pushed North. I contributed this to the fact that we were off the wall, shallower, and closer to shore.

What do you think?

Current wasn't doing what it was supposed to do this week-end ... seemingly. We dove Owen Beach (just off Pt. Defiance) yesterday, and timed it around slack ... and we damned near got blown down into the Narrows. We reached the barge at 95 fsw and ended up calling the dive early due to the unexpected conditions.

Current was definitely eddying ... it was going northward at 40 fsw and southward at 90 fsw (and much stronger at depth).

.. Bob (Grateful Diver)