Swim 8: Golden Gardens Right Rocks #3
Jenny got off work early at 5:30 pm and so we took off, picked up with another rental suit for Jenny at ChekaLooka and into the water at Golden Gardens by 6:00. There were the usual lookers-on and questions to answer for people before we put in:
“Yes, there’s amazing stuff to see out there.”
“Yes it’s cold, but not with a wet suit.”
And one new question:
“Yes, you need a wet suit.”
I forgot my hood but the water was extra warm today. It felt like around 58 degrees at the shore, so I abandoned my boots and tried to go with naked head and feet. My feet took it just fine, and that’s great news since my boots don’t really fit in my fins anyway. I can probably skip boots for most of the summer if I am lucky. Yet for me the hood was NOT optional. I did a test swim of about 2 minutes and the ice-cream headache effect came back in full swing. I ended up running down to ChekaLooka for rental. On the way back, I noticed a lot of glass in the beach. Be careful running barefoot at this spot as it seems to be the place where under age kids go to drink beer (or I’m just getting old) and there’s evidence of broken bottles in the sand near the right-rocks put-in. Buy some cheap flip-flops to leave on the beach while you swim or comfortable dive shoes to wear on the beach and beneath your fins.
After rushing back with a hood, we put in and began our swim out. Conditions were promising as it was hot, sunny, and the water was very calm but with a steady current at an extra high tide. Yet two things dampened the quality of this run:
1. The late afternoon sun was at an angle that really seemed to reduce visibility by about 75%. Conditions that I would expect 100′ visibility were producing something more like 25′ visibility. Also, the fish were extra jumpy at this time of day, perhaps because it’s the feeding time for larger predators. If we floated with the current, we could see all kinds of neat stuff, but every time they saw us move, they scattered.
LESSON: Don’t go too late or too early in the day when the sun’s angle will cause most of the light to be traveling horizontally, casing everything in glare or shadow and nothing in visible relief. The fish are jumpy a these times anyway, so it’s best to let them be. 6:00 is probably too late to put in at Golden Gardens.
2. I know that I have been advocating for going at high tide only, but this time, the tide was maybe TOO high. I’d been in out in 9′ high tides at this location twice and had a great time with lots of stuff visible. Although AyeTides on my iPhone told me this was just a 10.5 foot high tide, it was about 6 feet deeper on the coast than a reported 9.5 foot tide. The rock we call “Green Joe” was completely submerged with two feet of water over it and the seaweed forest was quite distant from the surface as we swam over it. Mermaid beach was totally submerged and I could barely stand at the most shallow location by the sea-wall. During other high tides it is an exposed sandy beach. Given that there was a solar eclipse on the other side of the planet, this must have been a spring tide. As a result, we lost some of our navigational bearings and went much farther up the coast than we usually do. This also made the deep water stuff more boring in the reduced afternoon visibility. Coming back, the life in the rocks along the sea wall was much more interesting.
Lesson: There’s such a thing as too much of a good thing. When the tide is too high, and you are farther from the action in the seaweed forests off-shore. Take it to the rocks along the shore during high tides and low visibility. Inversely, I must test whether this means that at LOW tide, when the rocks are terrible and the in-shore swimming is so bad, if the views out 200 feet are significantly better. It’s possible that the axiom I have been following of “never at low tide” is wrong and that I should be saying: Long beach? Extend your reach. Distant locations such as Mermaid Forest might look best at low side when surface plunges your closer to the action – or maybe it will be a murky algae bloom.
Only one way to find out.
Tags: Ballard, Golden Gardens, High Tide, Right Rocks, Seattle
