May 2009:
It took a long time to get things ready for my second attempt. First there was the matter of a wetsuit. One of my dear friends gave me a 7 mil hooded dive suit that was sure to do the job of protecting me from the cold enough that I could spend some quality time with whatever is in the sound, but on the chosen day to go out and try it I discovered that I couldn’t even fit a single leg into it. After much struggle I was really worried that this was all going to be too much trouble and that the inconvenience of spending an hour getting into a wetsuit would make this whole venture unfeasible. I gave the wetsuit to a more svelte friend who slipped right into the suit with ease and decided that I would have to look elsewhere to get suited.
Early June:
I discovered a local surf-shop right by Golden Gardens who rents wetsuits. These are considerably thinner than the 7 mil hooded dive suit that my bud gave me, so I didn’t know if they would do. These are for surfers who don’t spend as much time in the water moving through it full-body as I planned to, and the guys at the shop were not sure themselves what I would need. They really seemed to like the idea of a Seattle Snorkele Guide and really went out of their way to not mock me too much when I put on the first suit they gave me backwards. (Note to readers: Zipper in the back.) The shop is called “Cheka Looka” http://www.chekalooka.com/ and rents 4/3 wetsuits for 15$ a day. Come early or during a slow week and you can easily get boots, gloves, and hoods to go with.
Westuit lesson: Most suits will zip in the BACK. The long ribbon on the zipper is for you to grab and pull up.
Many wetsuits have a thicker material at the core than on the limbs. The wetsuit will be called 4/3 if it is 4 mil at the core and 3 mil on the limbs. You always say the bigger number first. This is the minimum suit thickness I would recomend for the Puget Sound. If you are me, it will do in the summer. If you are just about anyone else, it’s only good for an hour in the water before you start turning blue.
Safety note: Leave the water if you start shivering. Shivering is the first sign of hypthermia. The next sign is drowning.
I am short fat. Most rentals were hard to get on and didn’t fit too well, but they got the job done. I used it to my advantage and used the long arms to cover my hands.
My first wet-suit on, me and a friend hopped into the car and drove a few remaining blocks to Golden Gardens for our first REAL Seattle Snorkel trip.
The Actual Swim:
Weather: Sunny
Air Temperature: 75 degrees
Surface: Calm
Water Temperature: 50 degrees
Water Visibility: 30 feet
Tide: High, ebbing
I rode out in my wetsuit, sweating the car and down the beach while my partner waited to change in the bathroom at Golden Gardens. Of the two of us, I think mine was the wiser choice – though I am just as likely to do a fast and dirty pickle surprise change out near my car these days – the bathrooms were fairly covered in urine and we joked on our way down the beach that he already got his wetsuit salty. Yeah, I know…
We put in at the middle of the beach and were rewarded with our first lesson: Fogging is a HUGE problem in this water. With the colder water, your mask is very prone to fogging, so bring a good commercial anti-fogging agent or make your own from 50% no-more-tears baby shampoo and 50% water. If you don’t have baby shampoo, you can use regular detergent and water mixed at a lower ratio (1/5 dish soap, 4/5 water) and just try to avoid getting it in your eyes.
Of course we didn’t have any of that, so we applied liberal amounts of nature’s defogger and spit a lot into our masks, giving it a VERY light rinse when done. This works great for me, doesn’t work so well for some others – so do try to bring defogger when you go if you really want to see anything.
Hope you like Jelly Fish
Once mask-down we saw rolling seaweed salad and smooth worn rocks beneath us. We set out into some eel grass that gave way to a plethora of blue-jellies and not much else. I used what I learned in Hawaii and suggested we make for the rocks to see more life. So we headed to our left, down the south side west side of the beach to follow the rocks toward the marina – being very cautious of nearby boat traffic.
As we got to the rocks things started heating up and we saw some truly interesting creatures. Pen-point Gunnels snapped from the crevices where also schools of some shy Surf Perch fluttered about. Our favorite sighting was of a large red-rock crab, maybe 9 inches across the back, crawling into a crack between the rocks.
The water itself was blurry in places and the temperature varied GREATLY as we proceeded. It seemed we were looking at a kind of thermal distortion all around us as water with varying temperatures mixed. Sometimes this affected visibility severely, but mostly it was a transient effect. Still, if this was the infamously “clouded murky water” of the sound, it wasn’t so bad.
Most interesting was how thick the jelly’s got. At one point we gave up on trying to dodge them, and just tried to make sure our faces were protected. I got a few light dings on my fingers and didn’t really mind that much. On our way home we joked that the Sound was not actually made of water but increasingly smaller Jellys. We still had a good time and were looking forward to heading back.
Safety note: That was very stupid of me, some people have anaphelactic reactions to Jelly Fish stings and I didn’t know a thing about the species I was swimming with. If you see a cloud of Jelly’s just go find a better spot to swim.
We found some submerged rocks that were brimming with all kinds of neat organisms that we didn’t know how to name or place, but we definitely had a good time. It wasn’t Hawaii by any stretch but the results were…encouraging.
I gotta say that I got a kick out of the reactions we got from people. Lots on the beach were stunned to see us go in an Snorkel, many were curious, and children seemed to go into fits of joy at the sight of us. For a while kids followed our progress from the walkway along the top of the rocks we were following, jumping up and down and yelling and pointing excitedly. I wonder if any of them will grow up to try this themselves because of the day they saw somebody at the beach doing it?
Impressions: If this was what I could find jumping into a random spot at a random time, what would I be able to dig up once we learned a little more? I doubt very much that this is “as good as it gets” and this isn’t a bad if it’s “as bad as it gets”. Maybe this is a sport for more extreme types who don’t need the sweeping views, but who like to explore. I’m going to stick with it and so’s my buddy.
