Shallow T1 Boat

Clinton had planned a boat in March that was to target a site on the shallower end of the T1 range, but it was canceled due to bad weather. I was disappointed, since I liked the idea. So since I was organizing this boat, I decided to try that again. I'm not sure that anyone else was too excited about the plan (Clinton couldn't make the boat), but I was organizing so they had to respect my authorita. I was hoping for something like Lunaticos, but yet again the weather sucked and we were stuck in the bay. So it was Kawika's Garden, the now all too familiar backup dive site. I was diving with Kevin and Matt. We had brought our scooters, in anticipation of a more scooter-worthy site. We decided to take them anyway, in part because Kevin had his scooter-cam and in part because I'd never scootered the site before. I usually just meander around and didn't really know if I'd ever made it the whole way around.

On the way down to the structure, as usual, we were greeted by a school of fish. I think they were perch or some sort. When we got to the bottom, I suggested we circumnavigate the structure to start with. It took about 5 minutes to make it back, and I decided it was quite likely I had actually made it the whole way around before :) Just as we almost got back to the line, I scootered right over a gorgonian fluttering in the surge, with a basket star on it! I showed it to Kevin and made him get some video of it. We also found the ever present school of blue rockfish on the site. Once we made it around the first time, we clipped off our scooters and just kicked around for a while. Aside from the usual suspects, we saw 2 giantastic vermilions. They were scary big, and they were not happy that I was shining my light in the cracks they were hiding in. We also saw tons of Tritonia festivas, and quite a few little baby rockfish. When it was time to go, I pulled my bag and spool out of my pocket and then watched in horror as my spool unraveled and dropped away from me. Luckily we were only about 5 feet from the bottom, so Kevin just darted down and grabbed it, hehe. It was a pretty uneventful deco after that; I managed not to drop the spool or anything.

For our second dive, we went to Aumentos. We brought our scooters just for giggles. The viz there was unbelievable. There was a crappy viz layer down to maybe 20 feet and once you broke through that, you could see the whole structure below. It was amazing. It gave me a better picture of the layout of the site! We meandered around a bit, spending a bit of time with an octopus that Kevin found (who was surprisingly friendly and tolerant of us). Other than that, it was basically the usual suspects. I called the dive relatively early because I was cold. We headed back to the line and ran into the other team around 20 feet. In the murky layer and with some water movement, it was a big pain keeping track of the line. But eventually we made it to the surface and there was the boat. We scootered back to the back of the boat where I got trounced by the big waves as I tried to get my fins off. Eventually I gave up and Matt took one of them off for me. It was surprisingly sporty for Aumentos :(

I am still pestering Kevin for a video clip of the basket star, but have not yet been successful.