China Rockfish Puget Sound King Crab

Sponge Hill

Imagine a hillside, covered with beautiful cloud sponges, just off of Triton Ling Cod sitting on a Cloud SpongeCove in Hood Canal.  You don't really have to imagine too hard, because its real.   Sponge Hill is the shallowest of a series of three seamounts in Hood Canal about a mile from Triton Cove. 

The depth of the dive site (about 120' to the top) keeps it very pristine, with hundreds of ancient cloud sponges that have never seen an errant divers fin kick.  The area South of the pinnacle is the home of those beautiful old sponges.  Many house rockfish, lingcod or squat lobster that peer out at the bubble blowing divers and wonder just what the heck is going on.

My first visit to sponge hill was as a second (shallower) dive, following a deeper (200'+) dive on the deep pinnacle further to the North.  The north pinnacle was a bust (barren), but we were mesmerized by all of the life and Cloud Sponges surrounding the hill top on our second site.  We vowed we'd return, and have kept that promise several times.

Cloud Sponges covering Sponge HillYou don't really have to get excessively deep to dive this site, but these depths will go through your back gas very quickly and will put you into decompression, so do be prepared.  Checking my dive log, most of my dives here only run to about 140' maximum depth.  You can get to 160', but you have to travel quite a ways to get that deep.

Where is Sponge Hill you ask?  The best way to dive this site is on Don and Diane Coleman's charter boat (the Down Time).   If you insist on finding it yourself, look one mile due East from the boat ramp at Triton Cove.  You can't miss it on a nautical chart.

This site is suitable for very advanced cold water divers and is best for technical divers that are comfortable diving in lower visibility water.   For more information on this site, there is an excellent review by Nicolle Pratt at the Pacific Northwest Scuba site.