Pacific Northwest Divers, add your favorite dive spots

[newt]

I know this is an old thread, for posting here I apologise. I am getting back into diving after 4 years (Nitrox, Adv OW, drysuit) I have a boat in Bellingham, and would shore dive around there too. Any suggestions? I also would like to read in advance- any good guidebooks out there? Sorry for the newb to the area questions, I know how tiresome they can be.

[Soakedlontra]

Hi Newt!

I dive most of the times on Whidbey and Fidalgo Islands. My favourites dive sites are: Keystone Jetty and Pilings (next to the Keystone, re-named Coupeville, ferry terminal). It is a marine park so no fishing is allowed and there is plenty to see; Possession Beach Waterfront Park is a site to see orange sea pens and you can get deep pretty quickly, Possession Point Fingers is a steep clay wall with ledges and small caverns, a lot of folks dive there from a boat but you can do it from shore too but you have to walk down a hill to reach the beach, Langley Tire Reef is a shallow dive right next to Langley Marina, you can almost dive there any time because it is sheltered from the prevailing SSE and WNW winds and it is not current sensitive (I did my check out dives there when I was an OW student).

The dive shops in Anacortes and Oak Harbor sell a little booklet about local dives titled:

The Whidbey Island Dive Guide

Other books that I use to find dive sites outside my local area are:

Northewest Shore Dives by Stephen Fischnaller

and

151 Dives in the protected waters of British Columbia and Washington State by Betty Pratt-Johnson

The magazine Northwest Dive News publishes articles about local dives too:

Dive News Network

I hope that helps.

You can always give me a shout if you want to do a shore dive in my area.

Cheers

[newt]

Thanks for the warm welcome Soaked. i will check out those books, and if I look like I am going to Whidbey- give you a PM. I would love to dive with someone who knows the area.

[gharriger]

where do you get in at in winchester bay?

[kylgod253]

Scenic Beach in Seabeck always has awesome vis, sunny-side beack in steilacoom is pretty cool for shallower dives

[Orsk]

It's been a long while since I posted on this forum, but I have a change to one of the locations I posted about earlier "Owens Beach" in Point Defiance park should not be attempted unless the tides are perfect. My girlfriend and I decided to go out there for a quick dive one morning and didn't check the tides for that particular location. Once we got to about 40ft we started getting ripped towards the Narrows and down deeper. We had to dig in with our tools to keep from getting shoved any farther down the drop off. We ended up inflating our BCDs and shooting up to get out of that current. It was much easier to surface swim to the beach than trying to fight the current on the bottom. It might have been fun if we were set up for a drift, but we weren't and we were both spooked.