Cannery Point

After much waffling on what to do for Labor Day, we finally ended up settling on a nice easy dive at Lobos. We were leaning towards the Cannery Point area, but figured we would see what it looked like once we were down there, and maybe go to Granite Point instead. When we got there, things were sloshing around a bit on the surface, so we decided to stick with Cannery Point. I think we made a good decision. There were a bunch of the usual suspects at Lobos, including 2/3 of Team Bunny (August and Steve) and Cynthia, and Matt and Leah. They all decided to go out to the same general area that we were heading too. There were also some others, who were doing supposedly cooler more hard core dives. Chuckle.

The viz was not too stellar when we first dropped in about 40 feet, but we headed out along the sand channel hoping it would improve. As we were scootering along, I saw a thornback ray in the sand. I got Rob's attention and showed it to him, and we stopped for a photo shoot. While we were there, Team Bunny-ish descended upon us, and we showed them the ray. I also found a nice little group of juvenile rockish hanging out in some kelp drifting on the bottom, including some bigger coppers and some unknown species. Once Rob was finished with the ray, we continued out on the sand channel. The viz was pretty crappy up to Hole in the Wall, but once we rounded the corner it cleared up abruptly. By Lone Metridium (where we passed Matt and Leah) it was quite clear and blue. We basically just meandered from rock to rock, sometimes scootering and sometimes swimming, and Rob would occasionally take some pictures. We got to one of the taller ridges that runs parallel to Lone Metridium and I went up to the top to give Rob a silhouette. It was really surgy up there, and very swirly -- the up and down is a little hard on the ears, plus I kept wondering as I got picked up if I was going to be put down or end up getting whisked to the surface. Luckily nothing like that happened.

We eventually encountered a big school of blue rockfish hanging out in the kelp. Rob got some shots of them, and then started gesticulating for me to scooter in this direction. I honestly had no idea if he wanted a shot of me scootering through the fish, or he wanted me to scooter toward them to corral them to a different area. I think he wanted the former but I only successfully achieved the latter. Scooters are quite a useful rockfish herding tool. We also found a bunch of fun little cracks to scooter through, including one that T'd into another crack with a wall right at the intersection. I learned from Rob's near miss with the wall, and had fun turning the corner at a high rate of speed, as they say. Eventually we got to an area that was more sparse in terms of rocks and mini-pinnacles. I started to wonder if Rob was going to just keep going until we hit Marcos Pinnacle :) Right around then, he signaled turn, and we headed back. We ran into Team Bunny-ish again there, and decided to hang around there for a few more minutes before heading in.

On the way in, as we turned the corner at HITW, the viz got really really bad. Then it actually got better again along the sand channel. There was just a really hazy cloud of gunk hanging right by HITW. However, it slowly deteriorated as we approached the shallows, so we decided to thumb it at the worm patch, rather than risk getting separated in the muck. All in all a nice dive. Afterwards we headed to First Awakenings for some breakfast for lunch with Cynthia, Matt, and Leah.

All of the day's pictures are here.