Diving in Puget Sound

When I was a student at the University of Washington in Seattle, I was 23 and eager to experience new things. I was living a few miles from Puget Sound, a majestic appendage of the Pacific Ocean. Scuba diving was and remains a popular pastime in that area.  I took my initial scuba training in a pool at the university. I was really into it. I spent a considerable chunk of money to equip myself completely for underwater adventure.  

Me on the left

I had some interesting experiences diving in Puget Sound.  Some were funny, like the time I surfaced in the middle of a huge bloom of kelp and struggled like a damn fool to swim out of it. Later I learned, the easy way out would have been to drop below the surface and swim out beneath the bloom on the surtface. Another time, I was with a bunch of divers swimming sixty feet down, just above an old shipwreck, when suddenly an anchor came crashing down, slamming into the seabottom about 18 inches fom my head. We're talking about fifty pounds of iron. Damn. No way would I have survived that thing hitting me. How did it happen? The jerkoffs on the boat we arrived on decided to reposition. After doing so, they just threw the anchor over the side, not even thinking that there were about twenty people swimming directly below.   Definitely used up one of my nine lives that time.

Below is a photo taken by another diver with a camera.  That's me, hanging out with a squad of sea anemones.

After I completed post-graduate studies at the university,  I decided to relocate to Los Angeles to try my hand at other things.  That move also spelled the end of my flirtation with scuba diving.   I sold my  gear to a guy who used it to start a business, cleaning barnacles off the hulls of the yachts moored in LA's Marina Del Rey.