JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) – Giant Pacific octopi hide beneath rocks, reaching out tentacles to explore a diver. Schools of spawning salmon swim upstream. Prowfish surround the wreck of the Princess Sophia.
Recreational scuba diving in southeast Alaska requires a little more work and offers different challenges than warm-water diving, but those who do it say it provides sights unlike those anywhere else in the world.
The allure of the deep
When Annette G.E. Smith was a child, she was in a canoeing accident so traumatic, panic would set in any time she got water up her nose.
It wasn’t until age 45 that an instructor in Fiji told her she should learn scuba diving. She laughed at him.
“He said ‘I’ll teach you.’ And I was a challenge,” she said. “Once I got over that fear, it was like ‘This is it’ for me. It’s an amazing world down there. ... We have some amazing corals and sponges.”
Now, when she dives, she’s relaxed to the point she can’t even think about her “land life.”
“Any stress or troubles that I have in my land life are instantly gone,” she said. “It’s the most amazing thing.”
Local challenges
Local photographer Art Sutch is a certified dive master and dives regularly, selling photos and calendars from his underwater experiences at his downtown shop.
“You’re dealing with a lot of adverse conditions up here,” Sutch said. “Deep, cold water, zero visibility, current, sea lions coming up chattering their teeth at you. The biggest prerequisite is to get trained well ... before you go do a lot of crazy things on your own.”
Divers here used to wear wetsuits. It’s something Sutch said “just about killed me.”
Most divers now use drysuits, which require additional certification; divers have to counteract the lift of the air the suit traps with weights of between 30 and 40 pounds, said Phil Sellick, owner of the Scuba Tank.
Southeast Alaska divers also face seasonal challenges. Winter, in which the ambient water temperature can hover around 37 degrees, provides for better visibility. Summer has more glacial runoff. It also has more plankton bloom.
Then there are the creatures. Some are more gentle than others. Sutch calls sea lions “aquatic bears.”
“They will do everything to you underwater that a bear will do on land,” he said. “They’ll charge you, chatter their teeth at you.”
Sights
Sutch likes diving on the outer coast the best. The outer coast, he said, is where the water is a little warmer and has higher salinity, and the sea life is more diverse.
“The outer coast – it’s just a whole other world,” he said. “And it’s just big. You have the whole wide-open Pacific out there . You could do one dive out there and see halibut, octopus, ling cod, rock fish. Here, you have to go to different areas for different things.”
Rock walls, like a 300-footer where Sutch likes to dive on the west side of Portland Island, have upwellings that bring up nutrients from the depths, also sometimes providing for better dives. Smith also loves diving along canyon walls.
Sometimes, when they’re in their dens, the giant Pacific octopi will explore divers with their tentacles, Sutch said. He’s also been inked by them.
“They’re pretty neat creatures,” he said. “You’ll see when they get mad; the ones here have little horns above their eyes and generally change a redder color. They’ll blend in. They’re pretty wild.
“The biggest misconception about (Alaska) is that it’s void of life because it’s so cold. But actually we have a lot of life because of all the nutrients in the water and because it’s free of pollutants,” he said. “You dive new dive sites and might be the first one to ever dive there.”
