The summer sun in the San Juan Islands is a glorious happening. It comes in low and rich, saturating the water, the evergreens and especially the yachts gathered in Rosario Resort's harbor. Guests in the resort's regal dining room listen to the resident pianist playing a composition of his own New Age instrumental music and watch sailboats wander by while nibbling on breast of duck served with organic salad and something called "sweet carrot emulsion." The neighborhood Northwest scuba BandB was never like this. In fact, no other dive facility north of California has ever been like this. In a region where folks expect their outdoor recreation to be rugged, dive facilities have been, shall we say, somewhat rough around the edges. Dedicated dive lodges have run the gamut from someone's attic converted to a bed-and-breakfast to log cabins atop floating barges. Rosario Resort and its brand-new scuba facility, Island Dive and Water Sports, are neither rugged nor rustic. The resort -- built around a circa-1909 mansion on Orcas, the largest of the San Juan Islands -- limped along for nearly 30 years as a romantic hideaway with never quite enough people to fill its rooms. Enter Olympus Real Estate, a large investment fund company that owns, among other things, a string of motels and full-service hotels. Olympus bought Rosario in October of 1998 with plans to make it a cornerstone of its new luxury line, which includes small, upscale inns in California, New Mexico and the Florida Keys. While pouring $2 million into renovations and convention facilities, Rosario also attracted ex-Navy diver Ron Kenny and his wife Marci. They set about stocking the Northwest's first, and so far only, destination resort dive facility. OK, about the diving After loading our gear onto the boat, we headed through Harney Channel for a 20-minute trip to Bell Island off the western shore of Orcas. It was one of those ridiculously picturesque Northwest days: crystal-clear cobalt skies, thick firs along the shorelines, the occasional eagle wheeling overhead and, looming over it all, the snowcapped cone shape of Mount Baker. Because the Bell Island dive site is in a sheltered area, there's not much in the way of filter feeders, but it is nudibranch city. We saw five in less than a foot on one rock alone: alabaster nudibranchs and a bunch of lemon-tipped varieties plus at least one red-tipped, frilly opalescent nudibranch. And the crabs! Four or five different kinds -- chunky box crabs, delicate spider crabs, some hermit crabs and an oddball that looks exactly like algae, down to the leaf-shaped plume on its head. Next we went to Kenny's "secret spot," which he calls John's Drift. It's a channel with a healthy current and lots of life. After easing into the current from a sheltered cove, we were puttering along looking at nothing in particular when we rounded a corner and came to a series of crevices and small caves. The overhangs were covered with white, broccoli-like plumose, sponges, barnacles and enough other crusty life that we literally couldn't find a finger-hold. They were also artfully splayed sunstars, assorted crabs and the occasional oversize lingcod. And in one of the hundreds of anemones plastered along the wall, we found a clown shrimp, its translucent body banded with red, yellow and blue stripes. About this time, the current abruptly ceased. The still water let us hang out at this special place for the next 20 minutes. Back at the resort, Kenny refilled his tanks from a dockside air station (another Northwest first), then took us on a tour of his dive shop. The early-century building once provided dorm bunks for the infrequent visiting boater. Kenny has renovated the inside, where he has enough gear to outfit 14 divers head to toe. There are drysuits, 7-millimeter wetsuits, fleece underwear, regulators with computers and compasses and aluminum tanks of assorted sizes, including 10 dedicated to nitrox. He is also set up to teach diving classes. Out back is a rinse tub and a locked room where guests can hang their gear (which beats dragging it back to the room). Kenny stopped the tour to show us his favorite toy, a computer program called Chart View Tracker, which gives him animated tide data for his 30 or so dive sites. It's incredibly handy since these waters often have whipping currents and nasty tides. He can also access the program from his laptop computer aboard the dive boat. As for the boat, it's truly Caribbean slick: a 28-foot Canaveral from Florida that was custom-built for diving with tank racks backing bench seats. Kenny added a permanently mounted ladder (you guessed it -- yet another first for the Northwest), and he's building an enclosure for the winter. Plus there's a supply of hot water to pour into your hood and gloves (remember, the ocean temperatures is a chilly 42 degrees in these parts). This kind of dive boat may be ho-hum usual in Florida or the Bahamas, but trust us on this, it is revolutionary out here. Back in the water, it only got better. On one dive, clouds of microscopic krill billowed so thick it was like swimming by Braille in a fog. While inspecting rock crabs in a crevice, a half-dozen prawns showed up, and we actually got one to crawl atop our fingers. Huge schools of herring swirled around, and a mother sea lion and her pup bobbed up with us when we surfaced. We got so involved with the diving that we almost missed the rest of Rosario, which is a place with its own unique funkiness and charm. Rosario started out as a mansion for ship builder and business magnate Robert Moran, whose claims to fame included becoming mayor of Seattle and acting fire chief just in time to preside over the 1889 fire that burned the city to the ground. By 1904, the 46-year-old Moran was so exhausted by the stresses of his life that doctors gave him only a few years to live. So he did the only natural thing and ran away to the San Juans. The house he had built was constructed like his ships: massive, solid and elegant. The foundation for the 54-room building is cut 16 feet into solid rock. The walls are concrete, the inside is lined with Honduran mahogany, windows are nearly an inch thick and the roof is covered with 6 tons of copper sheeting. And, of course, there is the organ: a 1,972-pipe creation that was the largest built in a private home in the country. Moran sold the place in 1938 for $50,000 to a Californian whose wife favored riding to town on her Harley Davidson while dressed in a flaming red nightie to play poker with the island's locals. She may or may not still haunt the place, but that's another story. Rosario became a resort in 1960, serving mostly as a romantic hideaway until its recent reinvention as a destination for outdoors activities. There are a couple of things here you shouldn't miss, and the nightly organ recital/history lesson/stand-up comedy routine is one of them. You'll learn about Moran and the house, as well as the California industrialist and his slightly dotty wife. Best of all, you'll hear resort pianist Christopher Peacock make the organ do its thing. Later that night, hit the hot tub, watch the moon rise, perhaps catch some Northern Lights and hang around while the local herd of deer eat apples from trees on the front lawn.