What a wonderful week of weather we had been having up until Sunday, which happened to be the day I was not working, and looking forward to a great day of diving with my good friend Josey Goodin. Oh well, we still had a great dive, and a little rain never hurt anyone.

We decided on a lite tech 1 dive on the north wall. The plan was to swim out for 5 minutes at 160', and swim back towards the plumose gardens at 140' for 12 minutes, which would put us right in the plumose gardens for our gas switch and our first part of gas deco. I had decided to bring my camera along today, and snap a few shots along the way. We agreed that I would lead the dive since I was taking pictures, and Josey would take care of the deco portion of the dive.

After we threw on our gear we made our way down to the entrance of the "cut". About half way down I realized I forgot my camera, so I humped back up to the truck to retrieve it. Once I got back down to the water I had a bit of a sweat going which I felt soon as I got into the water, but the magic polypropylene went to work, and I did not even notice it throughout the dive. We did our equipment check, went over deco one more time, hit the exhaust button on our LPI, and descended in to the "best dive site in the world" according to Jake Wall :-)

It took us about two minutes to arrive at 70' where we reset our clocks, after three more minutes we hit 160' (this is the reason why we only planned 12 minutes at 140'). As we headed out at 160' we saw the usual large formations of Cloud Sponges with the token decorator crab, and squat lobster in each, but no decorated warrbonnets this time. I took some bad low light pictures of some sponges, then we turned the dive, and headed up to 140'. We made our way back past the cut, and towards the plumose gardens. I found a crab which I thought was a small Puget Sound King Crab, but it looked a little darker, and with a wider carapace. It turned out to be a Brown Box crab. About 10 minutes into our stint at 140' Josey signals me from behind. I turn thinking he is going to show me a wolf eel riding an octopus, but instead he points to a star fish. Thinking that there must be something cool around the star fish i scan the area, but come to realize that the main attraction is indeed a Cushion star. I snap a couple shots of it, and we thumb the dive.

We made our deep stops from 110' to 70', switched gasses, and started our 3 minute stop at 70'. The plumose gardens are a great area to complete your decompression, because they start around 80', and end around 30', so you always have something great to look at while on deco, and by the time you hit 30' you will be close to the bay and ready to swim in on your longer 20 foot stop. Deco consisted of 3@70', 2@60', 1@50' ,2@40', 3@30' 7@20, and 3 minutes up. Visibility was 30 feet, at depth, and turned to about 10' at 40' or so. 

The 20' stop was spent goofing about in the bay, Josey tried to attack me with a stick so I took it from him, and broke it. I then proceeded to drop a rock the back of his doubles....good times. 

All in all a great dive, and I am glad to be back in the water with Josey.