Nordic Joe's Seattle Snorkel Guide

Ok, it was the day before New Years eve, but close enough!

This juvenile Lion's Mane Jelly Fish can grow much larger.

Weather: Mostly Cloudy
Air temp: 45 f
Water Temp: 45 f
Current: Undetectable
Tide: Very High, ebb
Vis: ~50 feet

Time in: 11:30 ~ Solar Zenith

A few new things on this swim. First off, we found a better way to organize our outings. Utilizing the new twitter feed, it was easy to put together a team of three for our second serious evaluation of winter conditions at one of our favorite swims – the pipeline at Alki. Secondly, I was bundled up in my new 3-mil shorty over the 5-mil wetsuit and I borrowed my wife’s gloves and dive-socks to guard against the chillier winter waters.

One of our number hadn’t been here yet, and I warned him:

“I’ve read about a few cases of divers, usually without a buddy, drowning out here. Last I heard, they don’t know why. The story I remember is a diver coming up, crying for help, and then sinking back down – discovered drowned ten minutes later when divers reached him.”

We wondered if it was angry Octopus, pulling the divers down and taking their masks and regulators. With a shrug, we affirmed the commitment to swimming with caution, respect for the sea, and with a group – or at least a buddy. We vowed to stay close and look our for each other.

Of course, anywhere that there’s this much dive activity, there’s going to be accidents.  The location is very safe overall – maybe one of the safest, but with full disclosure, we can be on our best guard.

Putting in was as easy as ever. The tide was so high that the wheel chair access ramp actually lead straight into the water. This is surely the only wheel-chair accessible shore-dive in the sound. The convenience and clarity of these conditions weren’t just luring we brave snorkelers into the brine, as we spotted dive boats out near the buoy where the pipeline ends, and others were just putting in from shore. Still, we felt like we had the place to ourselves.

After getting in, I noticed that the new layer REALLY took the edge off the cold and made me just perfectly comfortable as our team set out for the “Reef Rocks”. It was soon clear that this location also was in the grasp of winter as the fish we spotted could be counted on one hand. Before, we swam with several schools of hundreds of fish here, but now we grew excited when we spotted a few big crabs, an impressive skulpin, and a few other oddities.

The Reef Rocks, as the name suggests, shelter a diverse array of life.

Every sqaure inch of this rubble is covered in life.

At a glance, this was another boring winter swim, yet closer inspection showed that as the big exciting schools of fish left, other ecological systems bloomed. The reef rocks were absolutely covered in uniform layer of hermit crabs. This brought me closer to inspect the smaller life here and I discovered some really interesting stuff in the crevices of the reef rocks, including this brightly colored mollusk.

Life continues to flourish in the realm of the very small.

A pleasent surprise was this molusk.

Here's a closer look at this shy little guy.

A few circuits of the rocks revealed that the winter swim offers a different focus where the small and unusual come to the biological foreground. Perhaps this is the seasonal cycle of the Salish Sea. (Any visiting biologists, feel free to comment!) While I might have been content to spend hours exploring this new face of the reef, I was lured out toward the pipeline feature itself as I needed to survey the entire area and learn how it changed in the winter.

Swimming out to the pipeline, we didn’t see any of the giant schools of fried-egg jellys as we had in the past. The water was super clear, blue, and beautiful. I was surprised to see what looked like 2-foot-high forests of sargassum muticum far below. This gave way to the eel grass that characterizes the region and soon we found the pipeline and followed it out. The tide was too high to make out much, but it appeared mostly unchanged. Still, there was far less activity all around.

We decided to expand our range of exploration after spotting some loose kelp in the area. I’m guessing that the fish winter in the all-season kelp forests, and this belief was boosted as a whip-like stalk floated by me with several small and brightly colored fish pursuing it.

We went north, about 500 feet out along the coast, finding mostly barren eel grass, tons of moon snails, a few star fish, and little else. Some of my buddies were starting to feel the chill. A flotilla of birds another 500 feet out from shore hinted at the location of my kelp forest, but instead we turned back – and it turned out to be a lucky thing.

As we crossed a line of flotsam, we discovered some juvenile lions mane jelly fish among the branches, grass and other floaty bits. These were about 2 feet across the bell and absolutely mesmerizing in their baroque excess of frills and decoration. This chance find lifted our spirits greatly even as it gave me a clue as to what dangers could have felled more experienced divers than I in this location. This is one of the few things in the sound that can kill you.  Most resources describe this sting as “Rarely Fatal” – which is a ton more fatal than I want to mess with.

Video Credit: Fellow Swimmer, Alex Williams

Lessons:

1. It is confirmed: The sound in winter remains changed and strangely vacant. The next swim should really be at a kelp forest to determine if there’s a more lively winter spot to explore.

2. Look out for lion’s mane jelly fish and KEEP YOUR DISTANCE. We used a zoom to get these shots.

3.  Is the S. Muticum already growing back?