I did two solo dives this week-end.
Saturday I did a dive at a place called Sekiu Jetty, on the northwestern end of the Olympic Peninsula. It's a very shallow dive, among some gigantic boulders that stick out of the water. The "bay" in front of the rocks is completely covered in bull kelp. And the current sweeping through from Neah Bay into the Straits of Juan de Fuca makes this a very interesting place to dive, with diverse species of inverterbrate life, and massive schools of rockfish living among the kelp. Since I was diving it on a very low tide, it was almost like one long (92-minute) safety stop ... max depth 27 feet and average depth about 18 feet. Out past the rocks there's not much but sandy bottom and lots of fishing boats ... so I didn't go there. Overall it was a very nice, relaxing dive.
Today I did a dive I've been trying to do for four years ... a wreck in the Straits of Juan de Fuca called the Diamond Knot. This was my fifth attempt to get on this wreck ... and I decided to dive it solo. I did this dive on a 25/25 trimix with EAN50 for deco. Because the current here can be unpredictable, I had planned to shoot a bag and maker a mid-water ascent, letting the boat pick me up wherever the current took me. When we arrived, the current was stronger than we had anticipated ... strong enough to pull the upline ball completely underwater once we'd grappled the wreck ... so we had to sit for about 45 minutes till it slowed down a bit. Once we'd decided it was slowed down enough to give it a go, the boat motored upcurrent from the ball and dropped us in ... the three rebreather divers first, and then me. When the first team went down they pulled the ball down with them ... so I had to wait till they were on the wreck and the ball was back on the surface before I could go. I made a tactical decision to giant stride with my camera in my hand ... because I knew there was no chance the crew would be able to hand it down to me once I was in the water. But the drag of the camera and strobes proved to be too much of a "sail" in the current, and before I could even get my bearings I was past the ball and tag line. The boat picked me up ... I decided to leave the camera on board ... and tried it again. This time I got to the line without difficulty and pulled myself hand-over-hand to the wreck at about 80 feet. I immediately ducked behind some structure and just hovered there for a few minutes to let my pulse rate slow down ... then started poking around this gigantic ship that was completely covered in anemones. I pretty much stayed in the bow section ... varying my deptn between 80 and 120 feet and attempting to stay as much as possible in the shelter of the stucture where the current wasn't quite so bad. At one point I found a section that had some nice swim-throughs ... I could feel the current pushing through them and decided it would be good practice for my upcoming trip to cave country, so I swam through one in the "upstream" direction and then let the current push me back through the other one into the more sheltered structure on the lee of the bow. At about 40 minutes ... with the current showing no signs of slacking off ... I decided to cut the dive a bit short and shot a bag to begin a drifting ascent, switching over to my deco gas at 70 feet and making a 10-minute ascent from that point. As it turns out, I managed to get myself into an eddying current and was drifting in a gigantic circle the whole time. When I surfaced I was only a couple hundred feet from the upline.
This dive was definitely the most challenging solo dive I've done to date. But I felt prepared and confident ... and even though conditions were a bit worse than I had hoped for it was a great dive.
Now I have to plan to do it again sometime when there's less current and more visibility ... there's an awful lot of this wreck I didn't see.
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
No pictures this dive though 
