Saturday Night Ledge

      Yesterday we set out for Saturday Night Ledge with Cape Ann Divers. This weekend was the Gloucester Schooner Festival. On the way out to SNL we watched as hundreds of sailboats were racing all around us.  People have told me about this site before but this was the first opportunity I've had to dive it myself. I can say without any exaggeration that this location is the most spectacular place I've ever seen underwater. Words, video, pictures; none could do this site any justice.



After descending about 95 feet down the mooring line, you touch down in a small patch of gravel. As you look out in almost any given direction, all you see is rock. It looks like the summit of a mountain above the tree line. However, the main attraction of this site is a trench that is carved out of solid rock. It is so perfectly chiseled that it looks man-made. The trench itself is probably 40' deep and therefore bottoms out in about 140' of water at high tide. I can't even imagine what could have created this structure.  As you swim though the channel, the most amazing and bizarre invertebrate life are growing everywhere. Thousands of colorful lamp shells line the edges of the walls. We also saw sea ravens and sea stars that looked like they came from another planet.

    These photos are screen shots from some of the video I took while swimming through the trench. The trench extends for about 40 meters or so before it opens back up at the end to reveal a beautiful panorama. Realistically, unless you're diving with doubles, you only have enough time to swim to the end of the trench look around for a minute and then head back. I was initially creeped out swimming through parts of the channel because they were so narrow that you couldn't turn around unless you swam vertically and rotated on your axis.

This place blew my mind! I can't wait to go back, there is so much to explore here. I still can't believe that this place exists, let alone the fact that I can visit it and be back at home by dinner time. I will enjoy many return trips here.

 

         After our surface interval, we steamed over to "Paddock Rock." Paddock is a submerged rock pinnacle that starts at 20' and the dome quickly drops down to about 80'. We had to contend with a strong surge and very low visibility, but this is always a nice dive. Generally we see thousands of sea urchins in the shallows here. They eat the algae off the rocks and you can see a very distinct line of where they've been vs. where they are going.






Down deeper, from 50 to 70 feet or so, we followed a school of juvenile pollack. They always stayed just out of our vision but as soon as the school changed directions, the sides of their bodies shimmer and hundreds of fish appear out of the darkness. Below is a sea cucumber that Chuck was able to find. I'm having difficulty identifying it. I believe it's either a scarlet psolus or a brown psolus. It was the first sea cucumber I've seen in New England.