Current is one of the things we just learn to deal with in Puget Sound. My local (5 minutes from my home) dive site has a kinda weird current at times that we've lovingly dubbed the "Redondo River". It usually comes in on a big ebb, and manifests itself as a strong northerly flow in the shallows, and a rather dramatic downwelling along the dropoff. I had an interesting encounter there a couple years ago and wrote a little story about it ...
Miso Soup
Originally posted July 9, 2008
Sometimes the most interesting dives are the ones that dont go according to plan. Cheng and I had an interesting one at Redondo recently.
Id been having consistent luck finding lumpsuckers down in the seaweed beds between the carousel boat and bottle field
not to mention finding all sorts of other interesting small stuff like unusual nudibranchs, small octopus, the occasional stubby squid and grunt sculpin. But with the lumpsuckers, in particular, none of my pictures were coming out
mainly because they were all really tiny ones, and sitting on a piece of seaweed thats gently moving all the time poses certain challenges with a point-n-shoot camera.
We entered the water on a really low slack
the tail-end of an 11-foot ebb going into an equally large flood. But Redondos usually pretty user-friendly, so we werent too concerned. The tide was very low
we finned up while literally standing on the edge of the dropoff. There wouldnt be much of a surface swim today
we kicked out about 30 feet and dropped.
Going downslope, I found the tiniest mosshead warbonnet Ive ever seen
maybe an inch long. We stopped and took a couple pictures, and proceeded down toward the carousel boat
I was a man on a mission, after all. Further down the line we came upon a couple of grunt sculpins .. one of them quite orange and pretty.
Vis wasnt very good
but thats about normal on a very low tide. At the carousel boat we looked for the octopus thats been denning under there, but apparently it wasnt home. Or at least, it wasnt visible by peering under the boat. So we turned south and headed through the seaweed bed toward the bottle field.
We hadnt gone very far when I found what I was looking for
a tiny lumpsucker, so tiny it more qualified as an insect than a fish. I got Chengs attention and moved back a little bit so she could get a picture unimpeded. She took a couple shots, then motioned for me to have my turn. As I was setting up the shot, I noticed a lot of seaweed getting kicked up. A little annoyed, I turned to motion for Cheng to stop kicking
and then noticed that she was hovering perfectly still, a little bit down current from the subject
right where she was supposed to be. So what was kicking up all the seaweed? Looking upslope, into the current, I couldnt help but notice a literal wall of seaweed moving toward us
fast. About all I had time to do was signal Cheng, point toward it, and move closer to her. Then we were enveloped in a literal maelstrom of flying seaweed and current. Flying bits of seaweed were sticking to my mask, and visibility went to zero in a hurry.
We both reached out and grabbed each other, holding hands as the current kicked both us and the seaweed around. To say it was disorienting is an understatement
I know I lost all sense of direction, and Im sure Cheng did too. So I pushed downward on her hand and released all the air from my suit and wing
hoping she would do the same (she did). We felt
but did not see
the bottom.
Well
I thought to myself
this is good practice. Im trained for it, but shes not. Weve done a lot of dives together, so lets see where it goes. Tugging on her hand, I guided her in the direction I thought would get us back to the carousel boat. She squeezed my hand back (OK) and pushed in the same direction (she understood what I wanted to do). Clinging to each others hands, we literally crawled together
not being able to see a thing past the inside of our masks. Within a minute or so we literally bumped into the side of the boat. Feeling our way to the bow, we found the guide rope that would take us back upslope. Once on the rope, life felt good indeed
I knew that as long as we didnt lose the rope we wouldnt need to see
it would take us home.
By the time we got back up to 50 feet, the current had slowed down and the seaweed had thinned out to the point where we could at least let go and wipe our masks clear
we could see the rope and parts of each other. The current was still running downslope, but at a much moderated pace
one we could easily deal with. At about 30 feet the current reversed, and gently pushed us upslope. At 10 feet it quit altogether.
When we surfaced, everything around us looked completely calm. We were a bit baffled by what wed experienced until we looked further out, where we could see a line of ripples running like a river
bracketed on both sides by glassy calm water and moving steadily away from shore.
Getting out of the water was downright comical
we were covered head to toe in seaweed
two swamp things emerging from the deep. As we headed off to the showers I remarked to Cheng, what the heck was that, anyway. Her response was typically Cheng
all she said was miso soup.
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
