Montana

We had the Escapade on Saturday as well, in case weather, suckiness, etc. caused us to need another day on the boat for T2. So we went out for a fun dive. We were trying to get over to Deep E3, again, and it was quite calm so our chances looked better. The ride down to Carmel was pretty smooth, but it was foggy :( For a while it was too foggy for our comfort. Then it opened up further south around Monastery. But there was still a fog bank hanging over the E3 area. So we decided to try to wait it out, and we just drifted around off of Monastery for a while. The fog didn't improve over E3, so we decided to dive Montana instead. Since we had been planning for a deeper dive, we decided to head to the deeper side of Montana.

For whatever reason, that plan didn't survive immersion. We ended up scootering around in about 130' to 140' for the most part. We saw the usual Montana suspects, plus a ton of juvenile rockfish. One big cloud of juveys had a bunch with a distinctive diamond on their sides. Tom Laidig apparently stumbled across one of the pictures Rob took, and emailed us to ID the fish for us -- the ones with diamonds on their sides are halfbanded rockfish (which I'd never even heard of before), and there were also stripetails in the mix. It's nice to do Montana by boat, so we actually have a decent amount of time to soak in the scenery, versus scootering from shore, when I always feel like by the time we get there, there's barely time to spend there. Near the end, we did a quick loop around the top, and met up with Beto and Susan back at the upline (Dean sat out the dive due to the sniffles). Due to the fog threat, we had agreed to all meet up at the upline at a specified time, and shoot bags and drift together. Since the dive was so much shallower than planned, Rob negotiated a 5 minute extension to the dive. Then we all met up and shot bags and drifted together. The water was pretty toasty warm on the ascent. The 70' stop seemed practically boring without the dreaded bottle rotation to do :P

On the boat ride back, we ran into some more dolphins, but still no whales :( Beto was so excited to see the dolphins, he almost feel right over the bow, but a stern warning from Jim prevented that :P I decided to celebrate the successful class with a visit to the wheelhouse, where I never go. The view up there is really nice! I admitted to the crew my extreme fear of falling off the ladder was the reason that I never go up there, so Michael proceeded to tell me about each of his hairy experiences in the ladder. Thanks for that.

We went to Tillie Gort's for lunch. I'd never been there before, but I thought it was great, so hopefully it will work its way into the rotation.