West Coast Shootout #7 - Part 1: The Diamond Knot Tuesday, July 27, 2010 It isn't very often as a photographer that you get to be a part of a truly epic trip. These trips are the ones where your go to a great destination with awesome people and everyone comes back raving about how amazing the experience was. The plan for the West Coast Shootout #7 was to dive the shipwreck of the Diamond Knot. The wreck itself is located just off the coast of Washington State, north of Port Angeles. The ship is steeped with history and was the focal point of the largest salvage operation on the Pacific coast. She sank in 1947 after a collision with another ship while carrying 154,000 cases of Alaskan canned salmon valued at over four million dollars. Most of the cargo was recovered, however this left the ship in a shattered mess of twisted wreckage. What makes this wreck so breathtaking is the amount of marine life that inhabits the expanse of the ship. There is a tremendous amount of water flowing through the area, and the currents are very unpredictable. These currents bring nutrients and food to the area, helping to create the perfect environment for life to flourish. The ship is completely covered with life: sponges, hydrocorals, tunicates and anemones adorn every inch, and large schools of rockfish hide around the superstructure. Sea stars and urchins cling to broken deck plates and wolf eels peer out from their man-made dens. The ship structure is twisted, with the stern laying on its port side while the mid section is collapsed in on itself from the salvage work. A single mast still stands towards the bow of the ship and one of the huge anchors still rests, ready to be dropped from its housing on the bow. The stern is completely covered with large Plumose Anemones, which creates a giant wall of white giving an eerie, ghostly effect as the light bounces off of it. On this beautiful sunny day in Victoria, the conditions seemed perfect for the trip across the channel to Port Angeles. The currents were providing us with a slack tide that, according to the book, was about an hour and a half long. Everything seemed to be perfect. The group of divers on this trip was made up of five others plus myself. We are all very experienced and two of us had been on the Diamond Knot before.  The trip over was not as the Victoria weather man had predicted: the seas were very choppy, the wind had picked up, and a huge fog bank had rolled in eclipsing the sun and the beautiful July weather. The captain decided to push through the weather assuming it would be calm on the Port Angeles side. After a forty-five minute bumpy boat ride we had made it through the nasty weather and reached the shipwreck. The fog had dissipated, the wind had died and the seas were flat calm. This was going to be awesome! The only thing missing was the sun. We attached to the the wreck and slipped into the water.  We had tied off on the stern section of the wreck and the current was dying down. The wreck started to come into view around the eighty foot mark as the visibility was limited due to the combination of large particulate filling the water and the lack of sun over head; it was dark making for very challenging photographic conditions. It was difficult to take large wide angle images of the ship in the limited visibility, however I managed to make the best of the situation and switched my focus to the abundant marine life all over the ship. As a group we all knew that we only had a limited amount of time underwater due to the current beginning to flow once again. Slack tide is not always as long as the book predicts, and in this particular instance the book was a little off. The slack only ended up being about thirty minutes long which shortened everyone's dive, but what a mind blowing thirty minutes it was!!! All of us came out of the water raving about how much life was on the wreck and how beautiful it was. The trip back to Victoria and our second dive was relatively calm, the sun had come out and the seas had flattened.       West Coast Shootout #7 - Images Anyone looking to dive this sites please check out the dive site descriptions: Diamond Knot West Coast Shootout #7 - Part 2: Wreck of the Barnard Castle posted by Scott Stevenson at 12:30 pm
0 comments - Add comment

Pacific Marine Imaging

Victoria , BC