Tacoma Scuba Squad BBQ and Diving at Redondo Beach Along With Harper's Ferry Mini Golf Wreck Diving 5/30/2010

Operation Homework Evasion was a success... 9am this morning I met up with Sonia and the Squad from Tacoma Scuba for a couple dives and a BBQ. The first dive Sonia and I went down to the bottle field in about 80 feet of water. Somehow we found out that we had a third wheel that we had never met tagging along... Nothing like getting followed and buddied up with someone that you've never debriefed on how the dive was going down, equipment carried and emergency procedures... Dive one was a little short at about 31 minutes, with a max depth of 83 feet, but we found some bones and Sonia found a couple bottles.

Dive profile for the 1st dive at Redondo.


Wally was at the wheel cooking away some excellent grub, and there were conversations galore. I forgot that I had my camera in the car, so no above water pics... After the first dive I decided that I needed to move my pressure gauge mount so that it could be seen more easily and I needed to move the waist belt buckle further to the right away from the crotch strap. Otherwise the hours of tedious fitting and forming the harness to fit it just right seemed to have paid off. I'm a poor college student, so I also made my own necklace for my octo, and it worked quite well. I modeled it after Bassman's necklace, and it does the job for now. I have bigger items to save for at the moment...

Dive 2 Sonia and I headed back out to the bottle field to try to find some more bottles, and the couple longer bones that came out of my pockets while bottle hunting. Viz was so-so and varied between 10 to 20 feet. The dive length was 47 minutes and a max depth of 84 feet. I found a couple worthless, but interesting to me bottles, and Sonia found a bunch of cooler bottles. After the dive I went and refilled my tanks, and then headed to meet up with Victor for a Dive at Harper's Ferry in Port Orchard. His 7th dive and first one in a long while.

Dive profile for the 2nd dive at Redondo.


Dive 3 at Harper's Ferry had a even crappier northwest visibility (around 10 feet maybe...) We dropped down at the end of the dock and followed the line due north to the main wreck. We poked around for awhile, turned around and headed back to the dock. Where the lady at the Espresso stand floated me a free coffee since they didn't take credit (I asked before ordering and she told me not to worry about it, it's on the house.). They'll have my business any time I'm out there! The dive was a max of 30 feet and about a 38 minute long dive (at about this point Victor had loss feeling in his hands, he was diving a wet suit...)

Dive Profile for the wreck at Harper's Ferry.

The Roo with the Harper's Ferry fishing pier in the background.
The Roo loaded with Victor's and my gear.
Looking over the dive site.

The front of the new to me and newly assembled backplate rig.
A pic of the back of the backplate rig with the single tank adapter and doubles wing. At almost 60% off of retail price, I found the discontinued wing on sale awhile back while trying to find a 7/8" manifold, and the fact I don't use the wing for buoyancy with singles (i use the dry suit), and I plan on doubling my 100's... It was a great purchase and works awesome for surface flotation! The only problem with the wing is that it has the 12" hose, which means it is supposed to be for a double redundancy or back up wing, but at the price my poor college student budget couldn't pass it up... So I need to buy the longer 16" corrugated hose... The Dive Rite Deluxe harness, crotch strap and tank cam buckles I got from Tacoma Scuba, along with the light and most things that I don't buy used. There's an awesome group of guys that work there and I strongly recommend Tacoma Scuba. The backplate and single tank adapter is a hammerhead without the handles and weighs just under 12lbs. Hopefully the next purchase on pay day is a longer hose for my primary regulator... Then I need to find a set of used doubles regulators, and buy a set of bands for the 100's...

Scuba Diving, What I've been up to recently

Lately I've been swamped with college course work, and haven't had the opportunity to get out snowboarding and hiking. I have though picked the sport of scuba diving back up. I haven't been in almost 4 years after being stationed in Arizona, partially due to the fact that all my gear was stolen. After 2 years of slowly shopping craigslist and recollecting my gear... I've finally started diving again. The nice thing about diving is that I'm surrounded by shore diving spots where I live. So all it takes is a couple hours of my time and I can run to a local dive spot and hop into the cool Puget Sound waters and enjoy the weightless feeling along with the exploration of the underwater world. All in a matter of hours, and it doesn't take up my whole day, so it leaves me with plenty of time to study. So by no means have I not been busy exploring, but I haven't had the time to make blog entries. Here's an overview of some of the more recent dives.

first dives in over 4 years.
Les Davis, Tacoma, WA
Off of Ruston Way in Tacoma there are several dive sites, this particular one is fairly benign to current but subjected to the mud outflows of the Puyallup River. Luckily the 6 or 7 dives I've got to do here have had fairly decent visibility of 20 to 40+ feet. Features here are alarge tractor tire, a small rubble pile in ~25 feet of water and a large rubble pile in 30 to 80 feet of water. The rubble pile consists of debris from the old narrows bridge.

Edmonds Underwater Park
What can I say, nothing but exploration. The crew up in Edmonds that maintains this wreak has everything from rubble, to old hwy 520 bridge pontoons, to tug boats, to small ships... All I can say is the 2 short dives we did here were not enough. Hence why we are going there for 3 dives on the weekend of my birthday.






Harper's Ferry, Port Orchard, WA
has 2 wrecks that are easy to navigate to with a guide line from the end of the Harper's Ferry Fishing Pier. One larger 40+ foot wreck and a small 10 to 15 foot little boat. It was an excellent dive with excellent 30+ feet of visibility.

and more Les Davis, Tacoma, WA

I'll try to keep up the blog updates at a consistent rate, but I'm diving a lot and swamped with school work. Hopefully by march when I start getting some more hiking in I'll get more time to post the blogs. Other blogs to watch out for is a DIY canister dive light. I'm working on building a remote canister dive light that will be putting out 500 to 600 lumen, and be powered by a remote canister attached to my bc, while the light will be attached to a goodman handle on my hand. Also a scuba gear list post.

All underwater pictures taken by Sonia Brugger.