BFW & Landy's Ledge

9/22/2015

I was recently out with a good group from Cape Ann Divers and it warranted an annual "blog" post! We dove BFW and Landy's Ledge, both spectacular wall dives. Before leaving the dock, we noticed an unusual abundance of salps congregating around the slips. Every few years we see a bloom of these planktonic tunicates.

I shot the salps photo above from the dock, just dunked my camera in and started shooting. The water was thick with them. Below, Robert Landy is holding one. They are surprisingly weighty, gelatinous and mostly translucent. They do not sting.

More salps on the BFW descent

BFW is a submerged cliff beginning at about 40' and ending at 105' in depth. The top of the cliff is bright and seaweed laden, as the wall drops off, the substrate quickly transforms into a bleak lunar-like vertical landscape. Visibility can range from very good to practically nothing. A coating of fine silt on the seabed can easily be kicked up by divers. The wall itself can also corral sediment, but I've also been here on days where I could see almost the entire vertical stretch of the cliff.

However, the photography sweet spot for BFW is not necessarily the wall itself, but the band of terrain just below the seaweed at the rolling cusp of the slope down to the wall. Here is a stretch of vibrant pink granite accented by palmate sponges. It looks like the landscape from a science fiction movie.

Landy's Ledge is around the corner of BFW. It's a submerged pinnacle of granite that starts in 60' with drop-offs in every direction which makes it a very interesting and varied dive site. This day it was very dark and most of us ran lines or followed others lines to aid navigation. The dive was swarming with cunner and this is whole area is great for macro photography of the plentiful invertebrate life.