Back from the San Juans!

We had an awesome time up on San Juan Island this weekend. It was a first trip for both of us and, although we were there for just over 24 hours, it felt like a nice weekend getaway. We woke up bright and early Saturday morning for the 1.5 hour drive up to Anacortes to make it onto the 9:35am ferry ride. We arrived at the island 70 minutes later to a bunch of fog. Right next to the ferry landing was Island Dive, the dive shop we planned our dive trip with. Fortunately, in the time it took us to fill out the paperwork and get the gear we needed, the fog lifted and we were reading to go diving! This ended up being a great trip because a bunch of people from the shop came along with us: Dawn is the scuba instructor and former roommate of OUR instructor (she made it clear she was valecdictorian of their instructor class). Niki was the shop manager, Chris the divemaster and Captain J who chartered the boat:

Here is a bunch of the tanks and gear all ready as we headed out to Larry's Lair at Griffin Bay, our first dive stop. You can see the fog had lifted and it was a really nice, sunny day:


Matt and I before heading out for the first dive:


Here I am along with Chris after coming up from the second dive at Bell Island (excuse the redness on my face from the mask). This was an amazing dive as I saw a giant lingcod, a sea slug the length of my arm, and lots of beautiful starfish, fish and sea anemone. I even "accidentally" went all the way down to EIGHTY feet! Being a basic open diver, my max is supposed to be around 60' but I was following Dawn, the instructor, down and we were all at 80' before I knew it. She told me later to consider it Dive 1 of advanced diving--ha! In any case, it was worth going down that because that's where all the cool life was.


Chris, the divemaster, took a bunch of pictures on our dive trip--check them out so y'all can see what we saw! (although he saw way more since he went as deep as 112'!)

After diving, Matt and I ate some clam strips and drove out to the Lakedale Lodge where we were staying for the night. This was a beautiful log cabin lodge perched alongside a peaceful lake. It was just what we needed after the diving. Here's a view from our balcony:


We also dined at the Friday Harbor House and had a wonderful meal--highly recommend it. The next morning, we slept in late (since we gained an hour with Daylight Savings) and headed into town, parked the car for the ferry line early, and got lunch at a pub so Matt could watch the Seahawks v. Chiefs football game. (K.C. won! Woot! Woot!) Soon after, we took off on the ferry back to Anacortes--here's a shot of cars loading into the ferry...it was POURING rain for about an hour before we boarded.