25-may-2020: seattle tennis club wrecks
Posted: Mon May 25, 2020 7:15 pm
I hadn't done this one before and the combination of recent reports of terrible visibility in the sound, big exchanges, and parking issues at various sites made it seem like a good day for lake washington.
The GUE map showed a handful of wrecks at a depth of 22-24 ft close to the seattle tennis club and I've seen brief mentions of them before on NWDC so the wife/buddy and I went to check them out. We entered at the prospect street shoreline access, went out to about 23 ft depth and swam south till we hit the first wreck. I don't know much about this one but it appears to be a wooden ship, maybe 40 ft long although it's hard to judge size in the murk.
The next wreck was a ways south but since it was so shallow we attempted to swim there on the bottom. After a long swim we gave up and surfaced and discovered that we were almost there - right in front of the diving platform at the tennis club. We dropped back down and headed SSE and ran right into it. This one is a wooden scow and is roughly a 20x30ft rectangle.
If you're a fan of algae-covered chunks of wood, these wrecks are for you. If you're not, you should probably dive somewhere else. Critters in the lake seem to be few and far between although we did see a handful of fish swimming around, one sculpin-y-looking-fish with eggs, a weird mass of eggs in the weeds, a few large crayfish, and a bunch of tiny shrimp. The fish are mostly scared of our lights and so we only get brief glimpses of them before they dart away or retreat into holes in the wreck.
The GUE map showed a handful of wrecks at a depth of 22-24 ft close to the seattle tennis club and I've seen brief mentions of them before on NWDC so the wife/buddy and I went to check them out. We entered at the prospect street shoreline access, went out to about 23 ft depth and swam south till we hit the first wreck. I don't know much about this one but it appears to be a wooden ship, maybe 40 ft long although it's hard to judge size in the murk.
- first wreck
If you're a fan of algae-covered chunks of wood, these wrecks are for you. If you're not, you should probably dive somewhere else. Critters in the lake seem to be few and far between although we did see a handful of fish swimming around, one sculpin-y-looking-fish with eggs, a weird mass of eggs in the weeds, a few large crayfish, and a bunch of tiny shrimp. The fish are mostly scared of our lights and so we only get brief glimpses of them before they dart away or retreat into holes in the wreck.
- scow
