Four bold men brave flat seas
Sun rises over Cascades
The Mighty Elfin planes
Off the throttle
Oy, drop the ball!
 
Splash, splash, splash, down the line
Three divers and four lights
Thirty fathoms below
The Success meets
Cabin intact
 
Peering down the smokestack
Crawling under cabin
No engine yet is found
Clock is ticking
Trimix is breathed
 
One last glance in through hole
Deep under pilot house
Thar she is! yells Peo
Walter films
Sharps observes
 
Four bold men braves the rain
Steve topside, rest below
Slowly doing deco
Breaks surface
Happy grins
 
"All aboard!" someone yells
Ball's up, throttle forward
Back to Sand Point boat dock
A great day
With good friends

The Wildcat is an airplane wreck that sits in the middle of Lake Washington, between the I-90 and 520 bridge, straight north of Mercer Island, at a depth of 185 feet.

 

We are currently doing a SCRET project on the Wildcat, and Walter, Joe and I dove it Monday morning in order to get video of what's left of the airplane, and to give me a better overview of the wreck scene looks like than what I could get from the previous videos we had from this site. This was the first dive for me, and I needed the overview for some graphics I'm working on.

 

Lake Washington was flat as a mirror when we headed out, and that was a good thing since that's the only condition under which you can actually find the wreck on the sonar.

Yesterday, SCRET put two teams on the wreck of the Governor north of Port Townsend.

 

From the SCRET web page:

Richard and I met the first team out in Port Townsend, helped them unload their gear, and load ours. We then drooled over the blueprints of the Governor while waiting for the time to leave the dock.
 
We couldn't have been met by better conditions. Only small wind waves, the sun was shining and a mellow tidal exchange. The buoy was still in place, and after Mike had cleared us with the vessel traffic control, Richard and I geared up, jumped in the water with our doubles, a 70' bottle, an O2 bottle and a scooter each. We held on to the current line hanging off the buoy while doing some quick bubble checks.
 
I didn't quite know what to expect on the way down. I felt humbled by the sheer size of this wreck, by the complexity of the layout that I learned from the blueprints, and its reputation as the "Mount Everest" as Mark and others more experienced than me like to put it. I know of some divers that have had to do MANY attempts at getting down on the wreck without succeeding, and I know some of them consider this to be a more complex and difficult dive than the Andrea Doria. I have no idea on whether that is true or not, but if nothing else, it added an extra level of anticipation and perhaps a bit of nervousness as well as I hit the trigger and we left the surface behind us. We had a smooth descent that brought us down to the anchor which was jammed inside one of the caved in stern cabins. The descent took us two minutes and thirty seconds, and we had more current on the way down than what I would have been comfortable swimming against.
 
While Richard unhooked the downline so it could be retrieved, I stayed put (which did require some scootering due to the current) and looked around. We were at about 220' below the surface, and the wreck was far beyond any expectation I had had. It was the coolest thing I've ever seen under water. I could make out the green tint of the ambient light coming down all the way from the surface. Visibility was only limited by the power of my Halcyon 18W HID.
 
When Richard was done, we peeked around together, and started looking for one of the corridors than ran (and still runs) inside the wreck. The topmost floors are caved in, but underneath that, there are still intact cabins and corridors. We found a promising opening in the wreck. I took out the reel and tied off, and then we scootered in.
 
There were HUGE barnacles on the floor, and while relatively wide, it wasn't that high and I had no interest in punching a hole on my drysuit on one of those barnacles, so I ran the scooter out on my right side rather than the normal position underneath and out in the front. About 100' in, the ceiling had collapsed partially down. We could still probably push ourselves through swimming, but I had no interest doing that on my first dive on the wreck. The opening looked promising though, and may be worth exploring if I can find it again on my next dive on the wreck.
 
The corridor we were in was just beautiful. You could pick out various ship details such as a toilet and some plates, and it was all covered in sponges, anemones and the huge barnacles. It was as decorated as any cave I've been in. :-) And for once, the sea life wasn't disturbing or distracting. I normally find that it is just "in the way" when I want to look at the wreck, but here it complemented it in such a beautiful way. I turned the penetration, and Richard and I swam the same way back out again.
 
We then scootered up across the superstructure and over the the bow of the ship, some 350 feet further away. In one place, probably above the engine room where the smoke stacks had once been, it had caved in more than elsewhere. Just as we were coming out of from the 'ledge' so we could see into the hole, a HUGE, and I mean HUGE, red snapper was sitting out in the open. It looked like 6' long, so it was probably about 5'. :-) I screamed 'holy f#ck' through my regulator, and I heard Richard shouting something very similar as well. The current was beginning to really pick up, so we dropped down on the side of the ship to get some lee since we otherwise had to swim our scooters to make progress towards the bow. I recall thinking that I would definitely NOT like to do this dive without a scooter and a very dependable buddy. Doing this without a scooter would mean seeing just a tiny portion of the wreck, and continuously focusing on finding the next lee spot that you can jump to, rather than enjoying the scenery. That said, even with scooters we had to be really careful. There are so many ribs and pieces of extremely sharp metal sticking up out of the wreck that if you don't pay careful attention to where you are, you will rapidly drift into something as soon as you let go of the trigger, or, even worse, drift into one of the cavernous openings.
 
We crossed over to the other side of the ship again as we approached the bow, and spotted an ENORMOUS cleat and three beautiful port holes that were probably 15 inches in diameter, with the glass and brass still intact (actually one of them had a crack in the glass). There was even more sea life growing on the inside of the glass that on the outside, which looked very strange.
 
We again scootered up on top of the wreck, and drifted over the beautiful wreck back to the stern section. The stern is the really smashed up part of the over 400' long wreck. When she sank, she sank stern first, and it shows.
 
The stern is still pretty interesting to look at, despite it being so mangled. There are toilets, tiled floors, chamber pots and dinner plats spread all over it (and many other parts of the wrecks too). 
We drifted off the stern, looked at each other, and thumbed the dive at 24 minutes of runtime. From 180' and up I had enough ambient light to see my gauges without my light (though we of course used them since they help communications and team positioning). Our first deep stop was at 160', and I shot a surface marker from 120' so the boat could follow us. Walter greeted us at 90', and managed communication with the surface and taking our 70' bottles and scooters off of us when we got up to 30'.
 
We only spotted one dogfish during deco.
 
After about 85 minutes, we broke the surface. The small waves we had had when we jumped in had settled down and the Inlet was almost as flat as a mirror.
 
Can you ask for a better dive?

I've been playing with some 3D rendering software for generating 3D visualizations of some of the wrecks we're diving, to give a better picture of what these look like to people who are interested in the wrecks.

 

The first one out is of course the Falcon.

The SCRET web page has finally been revamped. The latest newsletter also contains more information about the Falcon, mentioned below.

At O-dark-thirty, the alarm clock went off, and I hurried up for a quick battle with the toothbrush, and shaving the most essential parts for the mask to seal, and then jumped in the car to drive over to the nearest shop to buy some mother's day chocolate as a bribe to my wife since I was going to be out all day. After a quick breakfast, my dive buddy showed up and we packed a car full of dive gear for the drive out to the Olympic Peninsula and Lake Crescent. After the customary pit stop at Safeway in Port Angeles for acquisition of a lunch sandwich and a grande nonfat latte or two, we pulled over to the side of the road just after the nasty curve on 101, that has seen at least two major car accidents over the last 80 years, one with a fatal outcome, and the other with a luckier outcome where all four survived.

 

We hauled our scooters and decompression bottles down to beach, and conveniently geared up in our double-104s in the car. It was a beautiful day, with the sun shining straight at us, and a breeze blowing down through the valley and out across the lake, as we began our descent, scootering downwards across the steep slopes down to the westernmost car wreck, the Warren wreck.

 

On July 3, 1929, Blanch and Russell Warren were travelling were driving westbound on Route 101 from Port Angeles towards their home where their kids were waiting for them. No-one knew what really happened to them until 2002, when their car was found in Lake Crescent by some divers. A while later, a femur was found nearby, and that has just this past winter been shown by DNA analysis to have belonged to Russell Warren. No remnants have yet to be found of Blanch.

 

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/66547_car15.shtml

 

The Warren family were involved in the search operation of the car, and found great closure in the fact that it was finally found. There's a rumor circulating that something has been taken off the car over the course of the last year. I hope that is not the case, and I thankfully didn't see any trace of that -- everything that I could see looked exactly the same as it did last year when I dove the wreck two times.

 

We looked at the memorial plaque that has been put down on the car wreck, and then, eight minutes into the dive, gave our final regards for the day to the Warrens and continued our dive heading east. We traveled about 900 feet at depth, until we were in the approximate position of the second car wreck - the one from a mishap on Jan 24, 1960 when the car (a 1950 Dodge sedan) missed a curve. All four people in the car - amongst the Beverly Sherman of Lakewood, Gary Lind, now residing in Paris, and two more, successfully made it out of the car and back to shore. This car wreck was - I believe - found in 2004, and some of the things from the car have subsequently been removed on request by the owners and returned to them.

 

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/172963_lake12.html

 

We didn't know the depth of the Sherman wreck, so we started looking at 220 feet and then worked our way up until we found it a little bit shallower than that. Just as the Warren wreck, it is in an amazingly good condition (but obviously a lot younger). The roof has been severely smashed in, and the window panes that are still in place have been shattered (but seems to have been safety glass, so the pieces are still in place). The trunk was open, just as we expected from the story of the retrieval of the bag (see the link above), and we could also peer in to the motor compartment (where the 6V battery was in AMAZINGLY good condition).

 

Diving in Lake Crescent is a strange thing. Being so close to the Puget Sound, the lighting conditions are so different. Even at 220 feet, it was so bright that we couldn't see the beams of our HIDs. I got out of the water with a sunburn!

 

After having spent a couple of minutes looking at the car and wishing that I had an underwater housing for my digital camera, we thumbed the dive and began our ascent. Our first decompression stop was at 150 ft, and after a total runtime of 87 minutes, we surfaced and checked our location for future reference, and then submerged to 10 ft and scootered back to our point of exit, a quick pit stop at Safeway again, and then hit the Edmonds/Kingston ferry.

 

All in all, a great day of diving in great company.

Spring has arrived to the Pacific Northwest, and it's time to move the diving focus to Lake Washington again. 9 AM on a Sunday morning, two dive teams boarded the Dash for the ride from Sand Point out to the middle of the lake, where we quickly located the wreck of the Mosquito Fleet gas launch Falcon on the echo sounder. She is very distinct on the sounder, which gave me good vibes. Hopefully the ferry I had done some research on would be in very good shape when I finally got to meet her.

We deployed the downline, and the first dive team (Pete Gelbman, Walter Jaccard and me) geared up. I was first in the water, and waited for the other ones to join me by the marker buoy where we did our usual pre-dive checks before beginning our descent down the 200 feet to the wreck.

The tint of the water deep in the lake is close to the color of the bottom itself, so we needed to pay close attention to our depth gauges in order to slow down the descent as we approached the bottom -- there's little heads up warning until you're suddenly just above it.

At three minutes, Pete could stow his spool without having to use it. We were on the bottom, there was no need to run a line from the downline to the wreck itself; we were no more than 10 feet away from the port beam of the Falcon.

It immediately struck me how well preserved she is. We don't yet know when she sank, or whether she was scuttled or had an accident (though we are guessing the former), so it's hard to know how long she's been down here. A good guess is that she is getting close to celebrating her 90th anniversary of her sinking, and she almost looks as if she could be raised and restored to working condition again.

The first thing I try to do when I drop down on a wreck is to try to orient myself on the wreck so I can start to build a mental map of the wreck. This can at times be confusing, especially on large wrecks, in poor visibility, and when the ship is listing heavily to either side. The Falcon proved less of a challenge in this regard. She is relatively small, we had probably 20 ft of visibility (although it's of course totally dark at depth in the Lake), and she is sitting almost upright with only a 5-10 degree list to starboard.

Our downline was almost on the port beam, so the impressive bow was nearby and made a good first stop on our circumnavigation of the wreck. The bow is one of the two highlights on this wreck. It displays how sturdy she was built, and also showcases her beautiful and streamlined lines.

We continued aft along the starboard side. The foremost part of the superstructure - mainly the bridge - is mysteriously missing, but the passenger cabin is still intact. We peered in through the window openings as we slowly made our way towards the stern. The white paint of her former days is of course mostly gone, and so are the window panes.

The second highlight on the wreck is the stern. The deck is beautifully crafted, and the rounded section where you can see people sitting on one of the photos elsewhere in this newsletter is still there, gunwale, bench, stairs to the top level where the life boat once was and all. You can even make out remnants of the paint that once spelled FALCON on her stern.
We swam in through the narrow opening on the starboard side of the stairs, into the passenger cabin. A hole on the port side gaped at me and made a nice emergency exit should we need one, but otherwise the interior of the cabin was also in good shape. We peeked around a bit, looked down a hatch in the floor down into the hull, and then continued out through the doorway that earlier must have led out on deck on the port beam but now lead out to the part of the deck and the superstructure that is missing. I dropped down through the hole in the deck and into the hull, and spotted a bottle that unfortunately turned out to be of too young a vintage to be a left-over from the days when the Falcon still saw daylight. Otherwise it could have helped narrowing down the date of her sinking.

We then continued back to the stern again, and dropped down to inspect her rudder and see if the propeller was still in place. She hasn't worked her way more than perhaps three feet into the mud, so two blades of her three-bladed propeller are still clearly visible.

During our last sweep forward along the starboard side again, we met the second dive team that had just come down to the wreck.

Once at the beam again, we had spent 23 minutes on the bottom plus a three minute descent, so we thumbed the dive, and swam back to our upline to initiate our ascent and decompression. About 80 minutes after we had begun our descent, we again saw the sun (metaphorically speaking -- this is Seattle after all) and were greeted by the Dash and the second team that had done a shorter dive than us and thus had already completed their decompression and boarded the dive boat.

After spending a week and a half in 90 degree temperatures in Mexico, my dive buddies up here in the Pacific Northwest talked me into joining them for a dive on the Al-Ind-Esk-A-Sea. This was my second visit to the wreck, and this time I was greeted by excellent visibility (between 20' and 30') and a great ride with scooters on the dive. Unfortunately it was a (relatively) cold 46-47 degrees in the water, which was quite a shock when compared with the week before.

 

Max depth 237', total runtime of the dive was 95 minutes of which 27 where spent on the wreck, six minutes descending (due to an ear clearing problem) and the rest doing decompression during the ascent.

Apparently, a week and a half in the tropical climate of the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico, some cave diving and possibly the antibiotics my doctor prescribed me, helped the pneumonia. Still a tiny bit of dry cough when I wake up, but doctor says that's to be expected for a few more weeks.

 

I flew down to the Yucatan peninsula and Cancun together with my family, and then we drove down to Akumal and the Hotel Akumal Caribe where I also stayed a few days last year. It's nicely located on the beach, clean, kid-friendly (but lacking a good pool -- but the lagoon is as good as any pool), laid-back and not crowded. Akumal is the first place where the tourism began to be exploited along the Riviera Maya, and Hotel Akumal Caribe is the first hotel in Akumal, but thankfully tourists focus their presence further up north in Cancun and down to Playa Del Carmen. This leaves Akumal and the hotel as calm and a little bit nostalgic.

 

I spent parts of the first three days cave diving. The first day, we did four dives in Carwash (or "Aktun Ha" meaning "water-filled cave"), the second day we did four dives in Taj Mahal (some of the pictures below are from that cenote), and the third day Danny Riordan showed us the mainline and the extremely cool Rock And Roll Tunnel in Nohoch Nah Chich. The R'nR tunnel is probably the coolest dive I've done to date. It's surprising how easy the diving is down here, in the sense that we were able to squeeze in 10 dives in two half days and one full day. (Cave diving in itself is *not* easy for the untrained).

 

After these three days, I spent the rest of the days on the lazy side with my family, enjoying the Caribbean Sea, playing the sand and the water with Sarah (and Mari), visiting the Mayan ruins in Tulum, watching the dolphins and manatees in Puerto Aventuras, and even visiting Xcaret which Sarah really enjoyed.

 

 

 

 

Well, if nothing else, I proved everyone in my office wrong. They've been suspecting I've had the plague. I've been coughing my way through the corridors the last few weeks, and finally decided it was time to see the doc today.

 

She did NOT like the sound of my lungs, and immediately sent me over to X-ray my chest. Pneumonia on both lungs. Yikes. Now I'm on antibiotics and steroids all of a sudden. I hope it won't interfere too much with our vacation plans.

Sunday, we were planning on a dive on the Al-Ind-Esk-A-See, but we bailed out because of the weather. All this rain kills the visibility.

 

Instead, we did a scooter run around West Seattle. As usual, a bunch of people showed up, and we counted nine Gavin scooters on the beach before the dive.

 

My cough is getting better. I wasn't quite sure if I should do the dive or not, given how I felt, but since I only seem to get sick when I don't dive for a week or so, I saw it as a cure. And I think it worked, it feels a bit better today. It was my first dive with Pete, and he turned out to be a great buddy.

 

In the afternoon, I took Sarah to the Seattle Acquarium. She loves it. This time her favorite were the Northern Fur Seals.

 

Ho ho ho

Several people have asked me how you can leave a line next to a dolphin and then a few months later dive next to the dolphin and expect to find the line again.

 

Don't dolphins move faster than that?

 

Was it a dead dolphin? How gross!?

 

Actually there's an easier explanation than that. The word dolphin has two different meanings. Apart from the marine mammal, it can also refer to a particular construction that is often used by ships when berthing. This link leads to a picture of such a dolphin, and this is the kind of dolphin I was referring to in the previous blog entry. :-)   

 

Today I took the day off to help Underwater Admiralty Services retrieve fish sensors in the Tacoma Narrows.

 

This is a very tide sensitive area, with high currents, so we needed to time the slack perfectly. Even so, we brought our scooters to be able to maneuver comfortably in the water. It is never really slack here.

 

We had two boats with two dive teams. The first dive team, me and Richard, were targeting the deep sensor for the day in the middle of the Narrows, 150 feet down. The second dive team, Walter and Joe, were to retrieve two sensors in 80 feet of water, one on each side of the channel, during two dives.

 

We located the concrete block the sensor was attached to using our fish finder, and dropped a down line on it. Richard and I geared up, and got in the water, and I took the new sensor that we were going to mount to the concrete block and clipped it off to my scooter D-ring. And off we went.

 

The lead weight on the down line was pretty close to the concrete block, but at first we couldn't find the sensor. It was supposed to be on top of the block, and we found a lot of stuff that seemed to be part of the assembly, but the sensor we were to replace was not to be found. We began to suspect that we were on the wrong concrete block, so we did a quick search using our scooters but didn't find anything else. So we went back for a closer look, and found the sensor on the side of block, close to the bottom.

 

We commenced our mission, and cut off the zip ties holding the old sensor (mounted there six months ago by the now late Zak Jones, who had just recently left Seattle for Florida), and mounted the new one. After cleaning up, zip tieing a bolt snap to the old sensor

and attaching it to my scooter D-ring again, we had spent 18 minutes at 150 feet, and started our ascent and decompression, including a gas switch from trimix 21/35 to nitrox 50 at 70 feet and shooting a lift bag from there so the boat could follow us during our drifting decompression. We broke the surface 36 minutes after we've left it, and could happily deliver the old sensor to the boat.

 

Unfortunately, the other dive team wasn't quite as lucky as we were. They were unable to find either of the two sensors they were looking for. The first one because the line that was supposed to lead from near a dolphin to the sensor was gone, and the second one because the sensor itself was gone -- probably because of fishing activities or curious scuba divers.

Yesterday, Sarah and I along with some friends went up Snoqualmie Pass and the national forest to cut ourselves a christmas tree. After a quick stop at the ranger station in North Bend to pay the $10, we headed east on I-90 and took exit 47 up on the snowy winter roads up close to the ridgeline. Down in the valley, it was cold and windy, but in the sunny slope up high it was sunny and almost hot outside. I put on my snow shoes, put Sarah in the backpack and tied in to the sled I was later used to pull the christmas tree out of the woods and off we went!

 

Sarah enjoyed the scenery -- she loves the mountains and the snow, and was excited to help with the tree cutting. Then she got tired, and almost fell asleep in the back pack on the way downhill to the car.

Imagine this:

 

Fill 'er up

Full tank, $3

Goes about 100 miles

 

The answer? A Vespa, which I've now been happily commuting with for a few months. Piaggio, the original. Italian quality. Hmmm... Well, the first 501 miles went fine.

 

But *eight* schools have closed today!? Come on...

 

Oh my god, I haven't updated my space in a long while. My friends are teasing me, so, here goes.

 

We had a great summer this year. Once the sun came out, the weather was great. Lots of lawn mowing now that we live in a house. I'm amazed about how the grass grows here in the Pacific Northwest. Mowing the lawn once a week was a must. I escaped a few weekends, since we instead opted to go camping. It's wonderful that everyone enjoys spending a weekend in a tent once in a while, including our friends. Well, some of them chose other lodging alernatives. ;-)

 

Sarah turned two this summer. It is amazing to see how she's developing. My dad came over to visit us during the early fall, and they really found each other. Both have a love for jig-saw puzzles that they fully exploited during his visit.

 

Dive wise, it's also been hectic. During the early fall, Mari and Sarah spent a week in upstate New York with friends of the family, and in the meanwhile I took my GUE Tech 2 class. I lucked out, and ended up with Jarrod Jablonski as my instructor, and lucked out even more since he -- together with Gideon Liew who did his Tech 2 Instructor Evalutation during my class -- stayed at my place during the class. It led to some quality one-on-one time with Jarrod and Gideon that I really enjoyed.

 

Because of class logistical reasons, my second experience dive was postponed a few weeks until Gideon had a chance to return to the Seattle area for another Tech 2 class. On Nov 19, I finally did my first dive on the wreck of the Al-Ind-Esk-A-See, which sits outside Port Gardner at a depth of about 240-250 feet. Below is the dive profile from the actual dive, as reported by my Sensus Pro and plotted using my own software. The blue line is the depth, the red line average depth, time in minutes is on the X axis, and depth in feet on the Y axis.