Mediocre Diving at Lobos

Kevin, Rob, and I all met at AWS on Friday afternoon to pick up a big load of tanks to take down to Monterey, for our T2 dives next week. Then we stayed down there to dive on Saturday. I hadn't even looked at the forecast, since our main goal for going down there was to move the tanks. But Kevin told us the forecast did not look so great. Anyway, Saturday morning we headed over to Lobos. As we came over the hill and Monastery came into view, we could see that the ocean was angry. Definitely not a good day to dive Monastery (though that didn't stop me from doing my best Bob impersation and saying "yea, I'd dive it" since he seems to say that no matter what the conditions!). We got to Lobos and saw brown sloshy water in the cove. Actually before we got that far, we passed Chuck who was pulling out of the parking lot, after deciding not to dive. We eyeballed it, and decided it was worth giving it a try. But to be honest, if we were doing a dive that required more activation energy (like schlepping bottles out to the float or a painfully low tide), I probably would have thumbed it.

We got in and scootered out a while on the surface. The surface was not too comfortable, but not that bad either. And the viz looked like crap (hard to avoid scootering into kelp, since you couldn't see it until you were right on it). We dropped in 40 feet. I had been planning to play with my butt D-ring once we hit the bottom, because I had just adjusted it to make it easier to reach. In the two minutes while I was playing with it, I got totally seasick from watching the kelp bits swaying around underneath us. Yea, it was surgy. And the viz was crap. Under 10 feet. We headed out along the sand channel, navigating off the instruments, you could say. We couldn't see any of the landmarks. The viz stayed solidly bad most of the way out. I kept thinking, maybe we should just thumb it. It finally opened up a little bit, around Sea Mount. By Beto's Reef, the viz was 15 to 20 feet. We poked around there briefly. Rob pointed to the spot where the wolf eel usually is, to which I responded... where is he? Rob told me he had been there but had just zipped off (probably didn't like Rob shining a light in his eyes :P). Not long after we got there, we headed off to the Sisters. Since the viz was pretty bad, I was surprised when we arrived at the first sister. It seemed to come out of nowhere :) We paused there, and at the second sister, and then spent a bit of time at the third sister.

The original plan had been to go to Beto's and the Sisters. Sort of at the last minute in the parking lot, Kevin asked if we wanted to hit Shortcut Reef too, and we agreed. Rob signalled to head off in that direction, and about 10 seconds after agreeing, I decided that in this viz, I didn't want to go that far. So I stopped him and suggested we just hang out at the 3rd sister. We stayed there for a bit, swaying in the surge near the top. We found a harbor seal zipping around at the bottom of the pinnacle, which I think we all found amusing -- good breath hold :) From there we headed back to Beto's. Almost as soon as we got there, Rob signalled to head in. I asked if he meant to head straight in, since there was really nothing to do in the shallows (due to the crap viz). So if we headed in from Beto's, we were basically calling the dive. He agreed to that. We headed in and around 35 feet (just past the boulder in the sand channel... which I nearly ran into before I saw it :P) we thumbed it. The best part of the dive was trying out a new drysuit, that I had just picked up on Friday night. I wasn't really looking for another suit, but I found a sweet deal on a suit that is in great shape, and fits better than either of my other suits. Now I just have to decide which, if either, of my existing suits to sell. What a dilemma!