We started the weekend off right, with a dive to look at the VLO (very large outflow) off the Alki swimming beach AKA ‘the monster’. It was rather sporty looking off shore from the beach despite the beautiful sunny day, luckily we were on the leeward side of the point so it was not total rock and roll entry. The most imminent hazard was actually the wing whipping beach sand into your eyes if you looked the wrong direction. We could sort of make out our dive site from the beach, but the whitecaps were making the upwelling mostly a figment of our imagination… “look… right there! ya Laura, whatever”. We entered directly inshore of where i noted it to be on our last dive, and a few minutes later we passed the eelgrass bed and hit the slope. We had a good bit of ebbing current, so it was easy enough to find making the assumption that our 300 degree course was pushed off a bit (we were scootering) so all we should have to do is hang a left and find the debris trail. Hitting the 30′ mark, we did just that, and voila… started seeing ‘stuff’ in the water that shouldn’t be there… leaves, and stuff… this led me to believe we were on the correct side of things and hadn’t overshot towards Alki Point, which makes for a bit of a scooter ride until you decide once and for all that you REALLY have gone too far and its time to turn around after wasting 20 min on the sand flats… not that i’ve done that more than twice 😉 A little further left and we hit the debris trail. If you haven’t seen one, its not hard to miss. You’ll be scootering along with nothing in site but dunes and then suddenly there will be a seapen or three and lots of ‘stuff’ on the bottom. first its just organic matter but you’ll see pieces of wrappers and things if you look closely. Once you find this trial, its simply a matter of following it to the mouth of the outflow. On Saturday we hit the water around 3pm so there was a wonderful amount of ambient light. As i was explaining (un-necessarily) to Lamont that “look around, debris!” “go that way!” (and pointing up slope) he obliged and moseyed ‘that’ direction (i was stowing my scooter and deploying the camera). I look up and realize that we are there. Just up slope i now see Lamont and behind him a MASSIVE plume. The rest i guess is best told by the video… 45 min of shooting later, with daylight fading, we make our way in (i only stumble once on the exit) pack up and head home… Mission accomplished!
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