Sares Head

Sares Head is the coastal headland at the southwest corner of Fidalgo Island in Rosario Strait, and the dive site named for it is a sheer rock wall running more than a mile along that shoreline. Access is boat-only. There is no shore route to the underwater feature; the shoreline above the water is preserved as Skagit County parkland with a hiking trailhead off Rosario Road, and that access is separate from the dive. The nearest boat launch is Cornet Bay inside Deception Pass State Park, about 2 miles from the site, and the wall is regularly dived live-boat.

The wall itself is expansive, deep, and sheer, continuing down past 200 feet to a bottom past recreational limits. The recreational profile is roughly 80 to 110 feet on the upper wall, with large caves, ledges, and overhangs at multiple depths, some of the caves large enough to swim into. The face carries a dense invertebrate community, and the Puget Sound king crab is the identity resident divers come here to see. The unusual attribute of Sares Head for a Rosario Strait wall is that the current is relatively forgiving, running north along the wall on the flood and south on the ebb, with a recommended working ceiling of about 0.7 knot.

The site carries a rocky reef biome across the full face, where the vertical rock and its ledges and overhangs give filter feeders and roving predators the structure they use. A kelp forest biome grows on the shallower reaches of the same wall, where bull kelp anchors on the rock and reaches to the surface. Scuba divers make up the traffic here, and the dive is intermediate to advanced for a specific reason, in that with the wall continuing past 200 feet, buoyancy control and depth discipline are the safety-critical skills for the profile.

Visibility at Sares Head is normally about 10 to 15 feet at depth, with the shallower reaches noticeably more silt-affected because the Rosario Strait silt regime, fed by the Skagit River, dominates the water column. There is no marine protected area on the site. Rockfish retention is prohibited throughout WDFW Marine Area 7 and enforced by state closure, and wolf eel and giant Pacific octopus are protected non-take species statewide.