Puget Sound · United States · Artificial reef · Sand slope
Cove 2
The most popular diving location in Seattle, entered off the beach
Photo: Dan Hershman · CC BY 2.0
Cove 2 sits in Seacrest Park in West Seattle, a straight walk-in over a silty bottom that slopes away steadily from the beach. What holds divers here is the material on that slope — submerged logs, old pilings and sunken boats including the Honey Bear — all of it well decorated with Pacific Northwest marine life. The slope carries on past the 40 m recreational limit, so depth is something you set rather than something the site sets for you.
Also known as Seacrest Cove 2, Alki Cove 2.
Where it is and how deep
47.5889° N, 122.3796° WPublished position for this site.
The dive
Everything starts from the beach at Seacrest Park, the most popular diving location in Seattle and a regular training site for Open Water, navigation and other scuba classes. Most parking is curbside on the street, so kit goes together there. The bottom is silt and it falls away on a moderate slope rather than a wall, so depth builds gradually underneath you and there is no ledge or wall base to tell you that you have gone far enough.
The interest is the material scattered across that slope. Submerged logs, old pilings and sunken boats, among them the Honey Bear, are well decorated with Pacific Northwest marine life, and they are what divers move between rather than following any single continuous feature. Working the shallower structures first and keeping the slope on one shoulder gives you a route back to the beach without a compass.
The slope leads down past the recreational limit of 130 feet (40 m), so the dive is bounded by the number you agreed on the surface rather than by the seabed. An exclusion zone of 46 m (150 ft) around the walk-on ferry dock takes one corner of the site out of play and has to be planned around, and the dive ends with the same gradual climb back up the silt to the shallows.
Marine life and season
The sources we used don't single out particular species here.
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prime | Prime | Good | Good | Good | Good | Good | Good | Good | Prime | Prime | Prime |
Season follows Puget Sound: Diving runs all year; visibility is often best in fall and winter, while summer brings 16 hours of daylight.
Know before you go
- There is an exclusion zone of 46 m (150 ft) around the walk-on ferry dock, so the route has to be planned around it rather than corrected underwater.
- The silt slope runs past the 40 m recreational limit with no natural stopping point, so the turn depth has to be agreed on the surface and watched on the way down.
Dive videos
Alki Cove 2 Site Walkthrough · Salish Sea Diver on YouTube
Questions divers ask
How deep is Cove 2?+
The slope leads down past the recreational limit of 130 feet (40 m), so there is no natural bottom to stop you. The structure divers come for — the logs, pilings and the Honey Bear — sits shallower than that, and the turn depth is a plan you make before you get in.
Can you dive Cove 2 from the shore?+
Yes. Seacrest Park is a walk-in entry, with curbside parking on Harbor Avenue and restrooms in the pier building beside the Don Armeni Boat Ramp. Stay clear of the 46-metre exclusion zone (150 feet) around the walk-on ferry dock.
Sources
- Seacrest Cove 2 — Wikipedia
- Seattle/West — Wikivoyage
- Cove 2 (node) — OpenStreetMap
Photo credits
- A frosted nudibranch with pale, translucent cerata crawls over a silty rock surface underwater. by Dan Hershman, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In The Logbook
- Cold-water diving: is it worth the drysuit?Cold water · 8 min read
- The best shore dives in the worldShore diving · 8 min read
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