Forgotten Pinnacle

On Sunday, Kevin and I were on the Escapade for a tech boat. I was really hoping not to end up stuck in the bay in crappy weather again, for the second day in a row (and third diving day in a row!). The weather actually turned out to be just fine. We made it all the way down to the Lobos area, but then the wind had shifted by the time we got down there, so we trekked back up to the north side of Carmel bay, to Forgotten Pinnacle. I had been to this site once before, but it wasn't the most stellar dive. We had been kicking and didn't find the good side of the site until right at the end. However, Jim and Joakim had dived it quite a bit recently, so Jim knew the right place to anchor to find the best spots right away.

We were scootering this time, and Kevin had never been to the site before, so we decided to scooter around the entire pinnacle (which is pretty big) to start with, to orient ourselves. We dropped onto a very nice, vertical, encrusted area of the pinnacle side, and headed clockwise. We came around the end to the other side and found a relatively barren, not quite as vertical area. I am pretty sure this is where we spent much of our last dive there. I was briefly considering turning around and heading back to the start point, since it was so much nicer, but I figured we would eventually end up back there. We found some neat little overhangs at the bottom near the southwest end of the pinnacle, where there were some fish hiding. Then we headed back to where we started, and just kicked around there for a while. There were a bunch of canary rockfish hanging around near the bottom there. I also found a few cool nudibranchs -- a really small Tochuina tetraquetra, a pretty small Doriopsilla spaldingi, and a Cadlina limbaughorum. I even managed to find Matt when I saw a the Cadlina, so I could show it to someone who would appreciate it (sorry Kevin :P). After that, we just sort of worked our way up the pinnacle until it was time to call the dive. Deco was uneventful, with a few (but not an insane number of) jellyfish.

Sorry, no pictures, since Rob wasn't on the dive :(