The bottom was about 25' below us, but just a short distance out, the bottom vanished into an abyss! A boat depth finder measured 180 feet there. We dropped over the edge, and leveled off at 100'. We found numerous crags, two of which were occupied by large octopus. We slowly worked our way back and forth along the wall, gradually working our way upward. I was a bit surprised we didn't find any wolf eels here. We spotted a ratfish, which is a really cool-looking creature. it has a roughly shark-shaped body, but has huge rounded pectoral fins, and it appears to sort of glide or fly through the water, slowly and gracefully, and it seemed to watch us as it went by. We also spotted numerous small creatures, a pretty large hermit crab, and a lion's mane jellyfish. On the way back, Jeff pointed to a small clump of kelp. I didn't know what the big deal was, until he lifted a piece and the leaf below was not a leaf at all. It was an olive-grey gunnel, slender, eel-like and about 18" long. If Jeff had not pointed it out, I never would have noticed it because it blended in so well.

I would consider this an advanced dive, as it drops off so suddenly and so deeply. Most of my dives before this, I had a nice mostly-flat bottom to guide me by, and only needed to glance at my depth guage when moving to another area. But at this site, you can go from 100' to 80', or vice-versa, and not even know it. You really have to pay close attention to your depth, buoyancy and rate of ascent/descent here.

Second dive:

This was a boat dive off the Sampan, a Bandito Charters boat, a great charter in Puget Sound. I buddied with Aaron. This was a cool dive for me, as it was my deepest dive to date (132 feet). Aaron and I dropped down to the top of the wall, and landed right next to a large male wolf eel out in the open. We swam with him in a couple of circles, scratching his belly, but he wasn't feeling sociable and eventually swam off. We found another smaller male out in the open as we approached the edge. We dropped over and descended to 110', where suddenly I was feeling the effects of nitrogen narcosis, the first time I've ever experienced it. I signalled to Aaron that I was narced, and it turned out he was too. After a while it seemed to ease off, and we continued our dive. Aaron was on an AL80 so he stayed at 110', right above me, as I followed the bottom to 132. I only stayed there a couple minutes, where I found one wolf eel in a hole near the bottom. I ascended to Aaron's depth, then we worked our way up the wall to around 60' and explored a bit more.