During ten days of fieldwork in 2022 and 2023, researchers caught ten sharks from the broadnose sevengill and the endangered soupfin species.
The Salish Sea separates northwest Washington from British Columbia's Vancouver Island. The 6,500-square-mile body of water stretches into Washington as Puget Sound, and the sharks were caught close to Olympia near the sound's southernmost point.
The SS Pacific was on its way from Puget Sound and Victoria to San Francisco when it collided with a big sailing ship in the dark off Cape Flattery on November 4, 1875 and sank in less than an hour. The Pacific had an estimated 275 passengers and crew aboard of which only two survived, making the sinking the most deadly maritime disaster in Northwest history.
Only a handful of details of what happened came to light afterwards because there were only two survivors—one who floated around on debris for 40 hours, and another for 80 hours.
Over ten years have past since my last dive in Hood Canal. I’m not sure why, probably because I’ve been so focused on exploring the pristine waters of British Columbia that the extra effort of driving so far south has always deterred me. But when Adventures Down Under, a dive shop in Bellingham, invited me to join their group for a Hood Canal dive charter, I was too curious to say anything but yes.
very now and then I get an assignment close to home, which means my dive buddy and I can usually load up the car with dive and photography gear, and maybe a kayak or two, and head out for a full weekend of adventurous exploring. If the location is exceptional, like an assignment to dive in Washington State’s San Juan Islands, we often allocate several days to experience all that’s available.
