South Monastery

Since we were down for the weekend for the NCUPS competition, we decided to dive on Sunday morning before the awards thingy. Karl had his new camera and housing, which he wanted to try out, so we went to South Monastery with him. Rob suggested that while Karl was futzing with his camera, I could futz with Rob's. So the plan was to just swim out a bit and find a spot and hang out there. We got into the water and swam out to the edge of the kelp on the surface. We dropped in the very nice viz and started swimming. I was #3 and kept falling behind because I wanted to actually look at stuff. Finally after we had been swimming and swimming, I asked Rob if he wanted to stop to take pics, and he explained that there was a problem with Karl's camera, so he couldn't take pics. Ahhh. So the death swim continued. I did manage to find a bunch of Limacias along the way (while I was falling behind :P).

We eventually stopped to look around for awhile, and Rob gave me his camera. I pretty quickly realized that the 30 second briefing Rob had given me on the camera was inadequate, and I gave it back to him :) So Rob took a few pictures instead, while we looked around at one of the larger structures. I signalled to Rob that we should turn the dive. He didn't seem too down with that, but I pointed out that we had been swimming out for45 minutes, so even if we turned now, we were in for a 90 minute dive. Okay okay, he agreed. Shortly after turning, we found a rock that had a nice little crack with hydrocoral in it. After the dive, we both agreed that we had never seen this particular hydrocoral formation before. I posed for a few pictures, and then we continued in. We came upon a friendly sea lion on the way end. It always seems like sea lions are more interested in zooming past you than actually interacting, but for some reason this one seemed friendly. He was almost harbor seal like in this way. Other than that, we had a pretty uneventful swim back in under the kelp. The kelp forest at South Monastery is so nice. I don't know why we don't dive there more often.

We ascended basically right where we dropped, and made our way back to shore. There was a bit of flopping around in the surf, but I managed to walk out under my own power, which is all I am really shooting for. But I did have the least elegant exit, which is sort of embarassing since I was the only single tanker :P I am totally sold on single tank diving for South Monastery. For a shallow kick dive, there is really no need for anything more!