Beating The Heat In Washington

We hadn't had the high temps across the rest of the country while working our way up what I like to call The Left Coast. The heartland it ain't! It had been beautiful temp wise, even if foggy quite a bit, in Northern California and Oregon, but we started to hit the mid to high 90's of late here in Washington- The state, not the D.C. We have done our first-as-always exploring what is around us and then started to do some of the things we love to do- found some oyster beds, some clam flats, and took a look up and down the waterways from our base in Potlatch, WA. It's a beautiful area and we especially like life on the Hood Canal so far and are looking to come back again next summer- late summer or early fall.

But hot is hot. And since the oyster bed right in front of our camp site is seasonally closed right now to oyster harvesting, I took out the 3 mil wet suit and did a little free diving on the bed to see what I could see. That will cool you off in a hurry. But it was very interesting. You certainly see things on the beds when they are under water that you will not see while they are exposed by the low tide- tiny little snails crawling all over the oysters and a few of the oysters open to the point where you can take a peak inside at those juicy little morsels that close up tighter than a drum once the water heads back out to sea on the outgoing tide. The underwater camera that I was using is merely a point and shoot uw camera- nothing real high tech- just water proof to 15 feet. Apparently, though I didn't think so at the time, I dove a little deeper than that because I did have a bit of water invasion into the camera, but nothing that a warm fresh water bath and a blow dry wouldn't fix- lucky for me. You will see some fuzziness in a number of the shots. Keep in mind that water, though it may look crystal clear to the naked eye, is seldom that. Add to that the loss of light at depth and the thermoclines- the layers of relatively warm and cooler water that overlap each other- create almost a wavy vision of the underwater world, especially increased the further you are from the object, or in this case, the bottom of the sea floor. In this dive location there was an ice cold stream entering on one side and a river that had been warmed by a power source nearby, so the water was especially perplexed.

Slide show will introduce you to the surroundings and then under we go......