The Real Alaska » SCUBA Diving the Last Frontier

SCUBA Diving the Last Frontier

POSTED BY Bixler McClure & Krystin Bablinskas IN Announcement, Featured Posts, Photographs, Recreation, Video @ January 6, 2012 - 1:44 pm

The Real Alaska is proud to introduce our newest contributors, Bixler and Krystin. These guys are the real deal. Get ready for an outstanding read, and make sure to get all the way through to see more beautiful underwater photos and videos!

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SCUBA diving in Alaska: nothing says fun like strapping a tank of compressed air on your back and jumping into 45 degree (or colder!) water. With its 44,000 miles of unexplored coastline, Alaska is truly the last frontier of diving. However, few are willing to take the cold, dark jump into uncertainty. Up here, you won’t find hand-held diving tours synonymous with most tropical destinations. Instead, you’ll find cold water, inclement weather, and a short window of opportunity to see more than three feet in front of you.

And this is during the summer months. Many think about diving; most stay ashore.

Enter us. We are Bixler and Krystin, California transplants but lifelong Alaskans at heart. We spent our college days working on a dive boat in southern California, but yearned to escape the crowds and headed north to Alaska. As soon as we set foot in the 49^th state, we were eager to unload our 9-millimeter wetsuits and heavy steel tanks to explore an untamed coastline, having a wealth of experience in cold water diving.

Diving in Alaska, however, is nothing like diving in the Lower 48.

First off, the vast 44,000 miles of coastline is mostly inaccessible by car. Any wannabe-geographer looking at a map of Alaska can see the handful of drivable surfaces sprawled across the 600,000 square miles of land, only a few of which reach the ocean. We solved this problem by saying goodbye to ever accumulating vast wealth and dumped our savings into buying a sailboat.

Second, and most obviously, it’s cold. Not the wow-I-should-put-on-another-jacket cold, but the wow-I’ve-lost-all-mobility-in-my-thumbs cold! It is an unnerving experience to try to take off your wetsuit while it is snowing without the use of your thumbs. Many people use drysuits, but we haven’t gotten around to getting those yet.

Learning the Hard Way

Dexterity is a must and Bixler probably has the best firsthand account of this experience.

When we were anchored in a cove in Aialik Fjord (part of Kenai Fjords National Park) in early May, he decided to check the prop zinc and shaft with a quick dip in what appeared to be clear water. Everything failed from the start. His wetsuit wouldn’t zip shut so he climbed into Krystin’s. His BCD (buoyancy control device) was failing to perform its vital job – keeping one buoyant. And the icing on the cake was that the deceptively clear water was actually a thick green soup below the surface, creating a disorienting environment. Thankfully everything worked out, although this was a hard way to begin the diving season.

Wrecks

When the water clears either through tide changes or freezeup, the otherwise murky water gives up its secret past. Alaska’s coastline is dotted with wrecks and other relics, either downed by sea storms or destroyed in the infamous Good Friday earthquake of 1964. Most wrecks are unmarked and we’ve had our fair share of helping other boats untangle anchors via SCUBA on said wrecks.

Our favorite wreck is an old barge that is charted (though not accurately) where the sand spit meets the island at Fox Island, just outside of Seward. It takes some finesse to find the wreck and often times you find yourself descending into the darkness through jellyfish the size of supreme pizzas hitting bottom in 110 feet of water.

But the barge stands out like a monolith in the sand. It rises from 90 feet to 15 feet and is home to a lingcod the size of a small child.

Relics

October is usually the end of our diving season. By then, the glaciers stop melting and the plankton disappears. We put our boat away and head for shore diving in front of the Sealife Center in Seward.

When the earthquake hit in 1964, Seward succumbed to a tsunami that destroyed docks and devastated the town. The docks were never replaced and lie in about 80 feet of water, half-buried in the glacial silt. We found the wreckage by accident, noticing the skeletal hand of wood and pipe sticking out of the silt in the distance. Closer inspection revealed treasures of a distant past: plates from the defunct Alaska Steamship Company, license plates from the 70’s, a bicycle, and the crème de la crème of our findings, a mysterious early 1900’s pot. A trip to Robert Service’s cabin in Dawson City, YT verified what the internet already told us: it is a chamber pot and it sits proudly on our mantle.