Region
South Puget Sound
The maze of shallow inlets south of the Tacoma Narrows (Marine Area 13), home to the largest base of shellfish growers in Washington.
Not a closure notice: confirm current harvest status with the responsible authority.
South Puget Sound is everything beyond the Tacoma Narrows (state marine area 13): a branching maze of shallow, muddy-bottomed inlets (Case, Carr, Budd, Eld, Totten, and more), warmed quickly by summer sun and flushed by some of the largest tides in the Sound. Those conditions grow shellfish exceptionally well, and this region holds more shellfish farms than anywhere else in the state.
What’s planned
Phase 2 is in progress. The map below previews the public data sources we plan to bring in for South Puget Sound; outlined markers are planned sources, not live readings yet:
- Sensors in the water: the University of Washington’s mooring in Carr Inlet profiles temperature, salinity, oxygen, and algae pigments from surface to bottom, twice a day.
- Tides: NOAA tide predictions for Budd Inlet at Olympia, the southernmost reach of the Sound.
- Harmful-algae watch: plankton sampling in Budd Inlet counts the algae species (Alexandrium, Pseudo-nitzschia, Dinophysis) that can close shellfish harvests.
The optional lease layer on the map shows state-managed (DNR) aquatic leases only. Most Washington shellfish farming sits on privately owned tidelands, a legacy of the state selling much of its tidelands before 1971, so the mapped leases are a small slice of the region’s working farms.
Coming soon
South Puget Sound is second in the Washington launch order, after Hood Canal. Once its sources are checked and flowing, this page will work like the California bay pages: a live map, plain-language conditions, and clean datasets behind them. The conditions read arrives as the weekly State of the Bay report, the same format the California bays get today; the sample report shows what it contains.