Lobos, Above and Below

We met up with Jonathan to do a little scootering at Lobos. He had Kevin and Ben's scooters for Rob and I to borrow. I've never scootered before (well, I played with Dionna's for like one minute in the pool before). So Jonathan gave us a little briefing on how to use them, and we got in the water. The water was a bit rough looking outside of the cove. Actually, on the drive down, I couldn't believe how rough Monastery looked (well, I could believe it, but it was probably the worst I've seen). We scooted out on the surface a little ways and then dropped down. We swam until we hit a sandy clearing and then we switched to the scooters. The plan was to scoot out to Three Sisters, then Beto's Reef, then Granite Point Pinnacles. In hindsight, that was a pretty ambitious first scooter dive. I was having a lot of trouble with the scooter wanting to pull me up. I knew this was somehow related to tow cord length (in fact it was because the cord was too long), but no matter how I adjusted it, it still seemed to happen. I also kept forgetting that you don't have to kick when using a scooter :) Anyhoo, the visibility was terrible. It was quite surgy, and darting through the kelp was both neat and difficult. It was very difficult to keep track of two other people while also concentrating on maintaining depth, avoiding the kelp, etc. At some point, Jonathan stopped and signalled to me... "where' s #3?" I turned around and realized Rob wasn't there! I am such a bad buddy! But we could see Rob flashing his light at us and a few second later he appeared. At this point, I decided I just couldn't keep track of the team in these conditions, so I called the dive. Boohoo. When we surfaced, the conditions totally sucked. It was so choppy, I didn't want to take my regulator out of my mouth. I was glad I had a scooter to get me back into the cove quickly. Swimming would have been unpleasant. I told Rob and Jonathan they should feel free to go back out without me, but they decided not to. 42 ft, 19 minutes (haha), 48 degrees

We met Cheng and Dow-Jane later on at Lobos to go for a little hike. First, we watched the baby seals at the south end of Whaler's Cove. There were several of them basking on the beach with their moms, and a few were even getting swimming lessons. It was so cute to watch the babies shimmy up the beach... they definitely weren't as graceful about it as the adults. Then we took Cabin Trail to North Shore Trail, and took that all the way to the end. We saw some really big waves breaking in some of the coves along the way. It was really windy along the coast, but nice and warm on the inland parts of the trail. Then we took Sea Lion Point trail (and saw some sea otters in Headland Cove) and looped back on Sand Hill Trail. Since it was so windy on the coast, we decided to take Whaler's Knoll Trail, an inland trail, back. Unfortunately I took the wrong branch at some point and ended up heading towards Pine Ridge Trail. When we hit the road, we just walked back to Whaler's Cove along the road. I decided last week that I have a goal of hiking all the trails at Lobos (which isn't really a lot). Unfortunately, I've actually hiked all of the trail that we covered on this hike, so I am no closer to my goal. Actually, I have never hiked the section of Pine Ridge Trail that we got lost on, so I guess that's something :)

Afterwards, we went over to Fisherman's Wharf and walked around there, and then got something to eat. We came home and capped off the day with a little kitty play. Oreo was being shy, though, so she hid from Cheng and Dow-Jane the whole time! Pepper had a lot of fun with them though.