By Andrew Wineke
For The Enterprise
Seconds after a 1,000-pound load of concrete blocks thunks onto the silty floor of Puget Sound, a 30-inch ling cod swims over and perches atop the pile, apparently ready to take up residence.
Ralph Sweet shoos the fish away. There are plenty of prime spots for ling cod here, in the Edmonds Underwater Park adjoining Bracketts Landing, but these blocks won’t be staying put for long. Bruce Higgins, the park’s unofficial curator and head volunteer, grabs a pair of cinderblocks and strides off into the gloomy haze 30 feet below the surface.
Higgins has volunteered at the park for the past 25 years. An oceanographic engineer during the week, only on weekends does he actually get in the water. And every weekend, Higgins, 53, spends four or five hours a day at the park, about half that time underwater. His face has a “porthole” tan inside the ring left by his wetsuit hood. The park is his hobby, his playground, his garden and his way of giving back to the community all rolled into one.
“It’s his life’s mission,” Sweet says of Higgins — after surfacing. “His knowledge is unbelievable. He knows so much about what’s going on out there.”
A group of about 10 volunteers pitch in on projects ranging from creating a network of underwater trails – which is what the concrete blocks will be used for – to sinking derelict ships for aquatic habitat and divers to explore.
About 40,000 divers a year visit the underwater park, some making long trips just for the experience.
“I’ve got 250 dives and I’ve probably done 100 of them in the park,” said Dane Allen, who works just down Railroad Avenue at the Edmonds Underwater Sports shop. “There’s always something new to find. It’s a great dive.”
The park began in 1970, when the city made it a marine preserve and sanctuary.
“I tell people we have an underwater park and people are like ‘You do?’ ” said Arvilla Ohlde, Edmonds parks director. “I wish we had a way to have a sunken camera down there so kids that come to the shore could see what’s down there. It’s pretty beautiful.”
Originally the park was natural, except for the 325-foot-long dry dock that was sunk in 1930 to protect the ferry terminal from waves. A 94-foot tugboat was sunk next to the dry dock in 1972, and other boats have been added to the bottom over the years, most notably the 70-foot Triumph that was sunk in 1999.
Some of Higgins’ earliest efforts at the park were setting up trails to guide divers to the wrecks. Those early trails have been expanded so there’s now a grid system of “streets” covering the entire park, with names like Happy Trails and Telegraph Way. The trails keep divers from getting lost – an important safety consideration in an environment where visibility is often less than 10 feet.
Over the years, the volunteers have added features besides shipwrecks, everything from tractor tires and concrete blocks to plastic pipes and pickup beds. It sounds like a junkyard, but it looks like a garden.
Anything placed into the deep quickly becomes covered with anemones and sea life and home to lingcod, rockfish, crab and dozens of other animals. Away from the manmade features, the bottom is mostly sand and eelgrass, but around the additions the sea is teeming with life. Even the miles of rope strung through blocks to form the trails is overgrown with seaweed and overrun with shrimp, so that the trails look like nothing so much as underwater hedgerows.
“You put this stuff in and you think, ‘It looks tacky,’ but you come back in a year and it’s all covered,” Sweet said. “We’ve got more life here than anywhere else in Puget Sound.”
Higgins says it’s important to think of the park as, well, a park, not a natural ecosystem.
“We’re really not trying to alter the environment,” he said. “The model is more like an arboretum than a pristine area.”
The volunteer group has no organization, other than meeting at Edmonds Underwater Sports every weekend at 9 a.m. to fill up on air. They lay out their plans and divvy up the work during the surface swim out to the dive site. There are no officers, no elections and no mission statements. The city takes care of the permits needed to sink stuff and the volunteers take care of everything else for about $2,000 a year.
“The goal is to stay focused on the park,” Higgins said. “(People) think there’s a huge organization behind this. We’re just volunteers.”
All the physical work keeps the volunteers focused and motivated, but it also gives them the chance to see things that infrequent visitors never would. Once, Higgins and Sweet were stretching out 200 feet of rope when a curious sea lion came down for a look. The sea lion sprinted from one end of the line to the other, staring first in Higgins’ face and then in Sweet’s, four or five times before moving on.
On another dive, a grebe – an aquatic seabird – dove 30 feet down to where the two men were setting up blocks. As they moved the blocks, dozens of tiny shrimp would swim off, and the bird would chase them. After a few blocks, the grebe would be flapping underwater, waiting for its next meal.
“You don’t get to see neat stuff if you don’t spend any time doing it,” Higgins said.
And the work is never done. The salt water is constantly eating away at the results of their labor. A sunken wooden ship will be eaten away within five years. The trails become overgrown or are moved by currents or boat anchors. Buoys marking the park boundaries shift or sink or fade in the sun.
“It’s never boring,” Higgins said. “There’s always something new to do.”
Andrew Wineke is a reporter for the Herald in Everett.
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