Les Davis

Les Davis in the Tacoma area of southern Puget Sound is a beloved local dive site that has served the Pierce County diving community as a reliable, productive shore diving option through decades of regional diving culture development. Named for the pier structure it involves, Les Davis provides the Tacoma-area diving population with convenient, beginner-accessible marine diving in the southern Sound's colder, more protected waters—a section of Puget Sound that differs subtly from the central and northern reaches in temperature, species composition, and the character of the tidal flows that shape dive conditions. Southern Puget Sound's character is shaped by its connection to the main Sound through the narrow passages of The Narrows—where the Tacoma Narrows Bridge spans the tidal waterway that generates some of the strongest currents in the Sound system. Les Davis, positioned away from the immediate current exposure of The Narrows area, offers more protected conditions while still receiving the cold, productive water that flows through the southern Sound on tidal exchange. The result is Puget Sound marine life in conditions appropriate for divers developing their Pacific Northwest cold-water skills. The pier structure at Les Davis provides the characteristic Puget Sound pier habitat: pilings colonized by the dense invertebrate communities of the cold Pacific Northwest—plumose anemones, giant green anemones, encrusting sponges, mussels, barnacles, and the diverse tunicates that carpet substrate surfaces in productive cold water. Each piling is a vertical slice through the biological zonation of the Sound, from the intertidal zone at the waterline down through successively dimmer, colder zones to the silty bottom where the piling base meets the seafloor. Swimming along a row of pilings, examining each in turn, reveals the minor variations in community composition and organism size that make pier diving in Puget Sound an inexhaustible natural history exercise. Giant Pacific octopus are expected at Les Davis, as they are at most well-established Puget Sound pier sites with suitable habitat. The site's southern Sound position and the pier's accumulated debris field provide adequate denning habitat, and patient divers who search the pier bottom carefully are rewarded with sightings that remind them why this species is the central obsession of Pacific Northwest diving culture. Dungeness crab move across the muddy bottom adjacent to the pier structure with the purposeful sideways-forward locomotion that makes them among the most distinctive and entertaining invertebrates in any Pacific Northwest dive. Fish life at Les Davis includes the typical southern Sound cold-water assemblage: kelp greenling, pile perch, copper rockfish in smaller sizes appropriate for this depth range, and the occasional lingcod that has established territory in a particularly advantageous structural position. Spiny dogfish sharks, often encountered in Puget Sound pier dives, occasionally cruise through the pier area in small groups, their small size belying the sharks' wide presence throughout the Sound as medium-level predators. For Tacoma-based divers and those exploring the Pierce County shoreline, Les Davis provides accessible, productive, authentically Pacific Northwest marine diving that deserves its place in the regional dive site inventory.