Edmonds Underwater Park

Edmonds Underwater Park at Brackett's Landing in Edmonds, Washington, is one of the Pacific Northwest's most celebrated and well-developed shore diving destinations—a designated marine preserve and purpose-built dive park that has served as the introduction to Puget Sound diving for generations of Washington State divers and visiting underwater enthusiasts from around the world. Established in 1970 as one of the first underwater parks in the Pacific Northwest, Brackett's Landing has been deliberately stocked with structures and continuously improved to create a shore diving experience of remarkable variety and accessibility that justifies its place on every serious Pacific Northwest diver's site list. The underwater park's boundary, marked by buoys on the surface, encompasses a section of bottom that includes deliberately placed dive features at progressive depths—from the shallow entry area accessible to absolute beginners through mid-range depths containing the most interesting structures to the deeper zones that reward advanced open-water and technical divers. The progression allows divers to develop familiarity with Puget Sound conditions gradually, each certification step unlocking deeper features and more challenging sections of the park. This designed learning curve has made Edmonds Underwater Park the primary training ground for the Seattle area's diving industry. The park's underwater features have accumulated over decades of thoughtful development. The sunken dry dock—one of the signature dives at the park—lies in depths accessible to recreational open-water certified divers and provides genuine wreck diving in Puget Sound's cold, clear-by-Sound-standards water. The Adriana, a deliberately sunk vessel within park boundaries, adds wreck exploration to the biological richness that the surrounding kelp forest and hard substrate provide. Artificial reef structures supplement the natural and deliberate features, creating habitat across the depth range that encourages diverse biological communities. Brackett's Landing's marine life exemplifies the extraordinary productivity of Puget Sound's cold water ecosystem. Giant Pacific octopus inhabit the park year-round, their intelligence and size making encounters here some of the most memorable in Pacific Northwest diving. Wolf eels claim their characteristic territorial dens in the rocky substrate and wrecks, their eel-like bodies and dramatically knobbed heads creating an appearance both alien and endearing—particularly when an established pair occupies the same den for multiple dive seasons. Lingcod up to formidable sizes hold position on structure. Rockfish of multiple species—copper, quillback, yellowtail, China—hover in their species-specific positions. The anemone communities at Edmonds Underwater Park are justly famous. Plumose anemones cover structure and rock surfaces in dense colonies of white and orange, their feathery crowns extended in the current to create the living carpet appearance that defines the Puget Sound aesthetic. Giant green anemones reach impressive sizes in the shallower zones, their tentacles dense with the stinging cells that capture prey. Painted anemones add color variety with their striped columns. These anemone communities attract the photographers, macro enthusiasts, and beauty-seeking divers who come to Puget Sound specifically to experience the cold-water ecosystem that most tropical divers have never seen. The convenience of Edmonds Underwater Park—shore entry from an established beach, comprehensive dive shop support nearby, paved parking, restrooms, and the amenity-rich Seattle suburb of Edmonds surrounding it—makes this one of the most accessible world-class marine dive sites anywhere in the United States.