Scooting to Granite Point

On Sunday, we dove with David at Point Lobos. Since he is one of those X-Scooter people, we borrowed scooters from Jonathan and Kevin so we could scoot over to Granite Point. It was so beautiful over there last weekend, we wanted to go back (Rob with a wide-angle lens :P). And David was planning to shoot some video. And then there was untalented me. The viz was pretty nice even in the cove, so we dropped down in about 10 feet and headed out. We usually swim out further on the surface and drop right in the sand channel. I don't know if it's because of dropping in an unusual place, or because of navigating on scooters, but Rob somehow had trouble getting us to the sand channel :) But that was alright, instead, we zig-zagged over middle reef. It was pretty, especially in the kelpy areas.

We eventually hit the sand channel, pretty far out along middle reef (maybe 50 feet). Right as we got there, we found a pretty long salp chain. Rob took some pictures and David took some video. Then we headed out over the sand. After not too long, we found the whale bones. I've heard about these on many occasions, but I've never seen them before. They were cool, but not worth doing a dive out there just for that in my opinion (since they are surrounded by sand). But worth stopping by on the way to Granite Point. We also passed some sections covered with swarms of baby shrimp (I think). We finally hit some structure in about 80 feet of water. Across a small patch of sand there was another smaller pinnacle, which we spent most of our time on. It had some nice pieces of pink hydrocoral (although the baby shrimp were swarming around it, so not so good for taking pictures), and also a nice elephant ear sponge. We also spotted a medusa a little off the pinnacle. A little bit further out was the rock that has a few metridiums on it (which we saw the last time we scooted to Granite Point).

David turned the dive on time (we planned max 90 minutes), and Rob led us back over the sand. At some point, as I was pretty close to Rob to his right side, he decided to look cool and do a barrel roll. As if in slow motion, I saw his tanks tumbling towards my head. Bonk. Ouch. I told him in the future he should really check that he has the proper clearance before doing that :) As we were heading over the sand, I was a bit confused about where we were going (southeast-ish). I figured Rob wanted to hit the shallow part of Granite Point Wall before heading back in. No, apparently he was just lost :) Anyway, we ended up at the shallow part of Granite Point Wall, and then headed back west to middle reef. We stopped to visit Itchy and Scratchy (as the two wolf eels have apparently been named). We found their den, but only Scratchy (the big male) was there. Then we headed in. In about 20 feet of water, Rob found a huge cabezon (the biggest I have ever seen). He was just laying on a rock, looking very lazy. He didn't seem to mind having strobes fired at him :) After some pictures and video, we ascended. We were around the mouth of the cove, and we surface scootered back in. 86 minutes, 83 feet, 46 degrees

Then we headed over to RG Burgers for lunch. It was very crowded. I tried a new milkshake flavor (chocolate peanut butter) and we chatted about diving and cats -- David has a cat named Nitrox :)

David's video is here.