Time: 2200 hours

Month/Year: September 2024

Location: Sitka, Alaska, approx. 57°03'00.0"N 135°24'00.0"W

Water Temperature: 52ºF / 11ºC

The text lands as soon as I do in Sitka, Alaska. “Hey Paul, just made it!" Outside the tiny terminal, nervous passengers search for internet service that isn’t there and nervously eye handwritten “cash only” signs. A largely analog Alaskan adventure awaits us all.

“Be right there,” Paul replies. Usually, upon arriving, I’d report to my day job aboard an expedition vessel, but this trip is different. I’m here on a vacation to find some crepuscular critters.

Barely an hour after touchdown, we’re off on Paul’s boat, through the north harbor and into the archipelago as the disappearing sun finishes setting. We’re looking for anything interesting on the depth sounder.

Paul and I met via a chance message on iNaturalist, a global hub for critterhunting nature nerds. His résumé there is extraordinary, having made 31,000 observations totaling 6,400 species on the side of his full-time work as an emergency first responder in town. But for as popular a website as it is, few divers actively participate in logging observations in most areas, and even fewer in cold water. One day he came across some lonely observations of mine and invited me to join him on a dive sometime—10 p.m. on a Saturday in September, in this case.

Related Reading: Getting to Know Greenland's Frosty Critters

Two hours after touchdown, the darkness is pierced by our lights making their way down the anchor line to our petite pinnacle. I love how night dives focus your attention. It’s just you and your buddy’s glow against the void world, every creature a fresh discovery as it crosses the lighted threshold into existence. A large Polyorchis red-eye medusa drifts into my searchlight, alien tentacles drifting in the calm current, while wiggling worms and dancing copepods flit about the beam of the sudden sun. Night diving is also an opportunity to witness a changing of the guard as the day crew trades in for the night shift. A collection of chitons, urchins, shrimp, crabs and pinto abalone clock in for their nightly cleanup of the rocky reef’s refuse. Usually chipper rockfishes, mostly coppers and quillbacks, have sleepily retreated into cracks and crevices, leaving juvenile cod to pounce on the steadily coalescing cloud of mysid shrimp and arrow worms enveloping our lights.

We work within viz of each other, and half an hour later, we’ve circled our site, the anchor line dancing lazily above leather stars and orange cucumbers. As we begin round two, I notice a bizarre billowing beast crawling into the open. It throws its webbed arms over an adjacent rock like a fishing net. In a flash, the pulsing red and white skin between its appendages is pulled down like a murderous window shade, creating a terminator’s tent over the reef that billows with the balloon animal’s tightening embrace. Now and again the curtains bulge with the outline of a terrified fish or shrimp tickled out from its hidey-hole by a tentacle. Then an arm slowly curls up and delivers the meal to the creature’s beakoning maw. The tentacle ritual repeats with each new rocky recess.

My own appendages can’t keep up as I furiously adjust camera settings, waving my light over to Paul while squealing through my regulator. The kraken king of the night court has appeared: a giant Pacific octopus out on the prowl! By day, the world is a scary place for such an octopus, a potential calamari snack for sea otters, harbor seals or Steller sea lions— but once the sun is down, it runs the reef. We watch in astonishment as it methodically moves from rock to rock with its flawless tenting technique until air and camera batteries begin to run low.

Looking for Paul’s glow to motion our way back to the boat, I find him actively ignoring the octopus, staring intently at his camera—he’d found a new nudibranch to add to his iNaturalist count. A bright smile cuts through the Alaskan night as he notices me shaking my head at him. For some, there’s room for plenty of marvel mollusks on a single dive rather than simply my octopus feature. But what can I say, I’m a sucker for the super cephs.

Related Reading: What It's Like to Be an Octopus Researcher