A (Diving) Weekend on the Olympic Peninsula

After several years of chickening out, I finally decided to take the cold plunge and get my open water diving certification. So, I didn't expect much from this April weekend in Hoodsport, WA, except for getting cold in the water of the Hood Canal. The actors for this trip are Rich, the dive instructor, Caroline, Tuan, Yuriy and your truly, the students. We all met for the first time two weeks earlier when we started the class.

The Weekend

The first surprise came with Tuan's arrival on Friday evening. He pulled out from his car what I first thought a big suitcase of clothing, but it turned out to be a portable Weber grill! He also brought enough food to feed an army, it seemed. Tuan, who described himself as someone who would try anything once, is used to cooking for everybody on his camping and fishing trips. He came with the intent of feeding us all. I was thinking about just getting dinner somewhere in town that night, we ended up having a pretty good BBQ where we stayed.

The shrimp season was open that weekend in the Hood Canal to Native Americans. Tribal people were out early on Saturday morning to fish shrimps and sell any excess of what they would use for themselves. That morning, before the dives, Tuan bought several pounds of shrimps from the tribe. After our two dives, Rich went back out to get some crabs and oysters. That composed the dinner menu, along with Korean style BBQ ribs, hot links and bread that Tuan brought.

Dinner started around 3:30 PM; we were starving after our (cold) dives. We started with the raw shrimps, dipped in wasabi soy sauce. Succulent! It was the first time Yuriy had raw shrimps. He started cautiously, and ended up liking it so much he could hardly stop. Yuriy, whom we all called the assassin by then, is an interesting character from Ukraine. He has interesting stories on the former Soviet Union and on one of his hunting buddies who shoots very well and is very skilled with the knives. It's one of those guys that you don't want to know what he does for a living, said Yuriy. That's probably how he got his nickname among us.

Fresh shrimps, fresh oysters and fresh crabs, it's hard to complain. And with the food that Tuan brought, and the enormous amount (to me) of booze that we had, dinner went on late into the night. By then everyone was very happy (I only had 2 glasses of wine, but that's enough to make me happy). We had a fire going since the sunset to keep ourselves warm. Yuriy took out an axe to chop the woods, which didn't help in dropping his assassin nickname (who would bring an axe on a diving trip?!). We all jokingly talked about how he planned our assassination that night and who would be the first to go. The next morning, I woke up happy to still be alive, though the beautiful morning fog on the Hood Canal made it a little surreal.

Onto Another Adventure

And the diving, you may ask. Well, it's cold. You can see sea stars, sea urchins, plumose anemones, crabs, and a lot of tiny moon jellies floating around 6-10 ft that make me think of that scene in Avatar, where those luminous things float around the Tree of Life. It was pretty cool.

We finished our certification by noon and I left by 1 PM. Since it was still early, I decided to take the long way home: a loop north through Port Angeles and the Pacific Coast before heading back. With that detour, I finally completed the drive of the West Coast on highways 1 and 101 from San Diego all the way to the Olympic Peninsula. The trip took me 15 years to complete, but that's another story.

Dates of the trip: weekend of 30-Apr 2011

Last updated: 2011-05-28 09:55:43 -0700