Doing It Bunny

Saturday we were at Lobos and we decided to do a simple kick dive a la bunny. In case you aren't familiar with the bunny style of diving, it involves getting into the water once for the day and doing a really long kick dive. We planned to head over to the Cannery Point area. It was a little sporty, but we figured we'd just head over there and if it was too rough, we could always go a little deeper to try to get out of it. It was a bit surgy in the sand channel when we descended, and viz was not too good. But things calmed down by the time we got to Hole in the Wall, and viz was probably around 20 feet. Rob wanted to "practice" running line, so he tied off right by HitW, and ran line as we headed out a couple ridges to the left. We worked our way along the ridges, and went to the top and over each one, stopping here and there. It was super surgy on top. I eventually took over the line, and man was it annoying running line in that surge :) I was looking for Hilton's nudibranchs for a while, because it seemed like they should be there. Eventually Rob found one, and then we found a bunch more along the way, from tiny to huge. After an hour or so, we turned the dive. We had planned to head over to the east side of middle reef for the swim back in -- I wanted to look for leopard sharks.

When we got back to HitW, we headed over to middle reef. We stopped by transect 2, and Rob pointed out a really tiny Hilton's. He saw it, signaled me, and then couldn't find it again. In the course of looking for it, I saw like 5 or 6 other slugs -- too bad we weren't surveying the transect. Rob also looked for his pet warbonnet that lives in a crack by the transect, but he must have been out for a snack or something. From there, we headed sort of southeast, along the rubbliness to the east of middle reef. We had no success finding a leopard shark, so eventually we headed back over to the reef, and then across it, to the sand channel. The viz had deteriorated somewhat in the sand channel, probably because the tide was going out. When we got to the worm patch, we discussed whether to ascend there or head further in, and we decided to keep going. We stopped around 15' and ascended there. I think the dive was just under 2 hours -- not sure if that is truly bunny-worthy. When we got to the surface, David and Kevin were waiting on the top of the cliff, gesticulating about their hunger.

The tide was super low, but Kevin came out to the end of the ramp to give us (well, me) a hand out. Very gentlemanly. After we rinsed and packed up our gear, we headed to Siamese Bay for lunch, where Cynthia joined us. After lunch, we headed back to Cynthia's place, where she fed us some excellent brownies.

Thanks, Kenn, for the dive-related bunny image.