Team Kitty was planning to dive together, but then John lost
his buddy to illness at the last minute.
We were going to split up, but then I had a little tantrum and declared
that I didn’t want to split up the team – it had been ages since we’d all dived
together! So we decided to dive as a
team of 4 instead. Surface conditions
were pretty reasonable, at least compared to last week’s fin-eating ocean
conditions. Beto and Susan got in the
water first, which turned out to be a good thing. Beto had some sort of suit flood, so he had
to abort the dive. We were already in
the water by the time this was discovered, but Susan joined our team while Beto
got back on the boat. Since we were
already in the water, there wasn’t any sort of discussion about the extreme
silliness of a team of five. I figured
if it got annoying once we were on the bottom, we’d split up then.
When we got to the bottom, it was quite dark, and the viz
was not stellar (but not terrible either) – I’d call it 30 to 40 feet. But considering the darkness, I didn’t have a
great sense of where we were. We
meandered down whichever pinnacle we landed on, and we spent a fair amount of
time on the bottom, just off of the pinnacle, looking for critters inhabiting
the rubble (Rob was shooting macro). It
was a very fruitful search. We found a
basket star right away, and then a Tochuina tetraqetra (or whatever we are
calling that one these days!) shortly thereafter. We eventually saw two wolfies two; one was
fairly large, and one was smaller and still sort of reddish. I also found a bunch of Acanthodoris hudsoni
and a single Doriopsilla spaldingi.
Eventually it came time to work our way up the pinnacle, a bit
shallower.
We scootered around a bit on the pinnacle that we were
on. Eventually, Rob decided to go check
out another pinnacle, some distance away, without really any warning or asking
if anyone wanted to follow. And we
didn’t want to follow, so we waited for him to figure that out. Then we had to send Kevin to retrieve
him. I guess this was the only time when
having a five-man team became problematic.
Actually I’m not sure that the team size had anything to do with
it. We finished off the dive working our
way up the pinnacle we were on. I found
a bunch of Dotos, but that was outdone by Rob, who found a Cuthona divae. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of
those, but Clinton had seen one the week before, I think, so I had the name of
it on the tip of my brain.
When it was time to thumb the dive, Rob wisely suggested
that we split into two teams. His
thinking was that the boat may be expecting two bags. My thinking was that drifting in a cluster of
five would be, well, a cluster. So we
split up; I was with Rob and Susan, and Kevin and John were together. But really we were all together – even though
we split up around 130 feet, and didn’t actually leave the reef or shoot our
bags at precisely the same time, somehow by the time we got to 70 feet, they
were right next to us. Right next
to us. I was literally kicking John
every time I backed up for the first half of the deco!
There were a lot of sea nettles on deco. When we were redirecting one of the nettles
away from us, we noticed that a bunch of those little fishies that hang out in
their tentacles sort of “fell out” of the nettle. Then once we were looking for the fish, we
saw them in all of the nettles! At 20
feet, Rob got his camera out, and took pictures of the fishies, and also some
of those little crabs hitchhikers too.
Those fish are pretty cute.
Especially when you bop a sea nettle on the bell and ten of them fall
out of. They look really panicked until
they can find another nettle to take cover in.
Anyway, the photo shoot was an excellent way to pass the time on
deco. When we surfaced, I managed to
reboard the boat without losing any gear.
There was a surprising amount of ambivalence about doing a
second dive, considering that the conditions were fairly good. But Beto wanted to get back in to test out if
his glove was still leaking, so Susan and I joined him. I wanted to play with my new Hero-cam (that
Rob gave me for my birthday). We went to
the anchor farm. As we headed down the
line, I found that I was out of Argon.
Doh! So I switched to backgas,
which was quite chilly. But I figured it
was probably going to be a short dive anyway, so I sucked it up. We never managed to find the anchors. When we got to the end of the anchor line,
the anchor had slipped, and we were just on a flat expanse of shale. We found a ledge and just followed that for
the dive. The viz was amazingly good for
the bay. It was better than the viz was
at Yankee Point, plus it was fairly bright.
We found a couple of octopuses and I found another Doriopsilla spaldingi
(which I was pretty excited and surprised to find there). Other than that, we pretty much saw the usual
shale suspects, and we found one taller ledge with lots of vermilion
rockfish. Eventually we got bored/cold,
so we shot a bag and headed up. The sea
nettles were pretty thick here.
We headed down to Carmel for the beach BBQ, and after not too long there, we headed home. I got an especially adorable birthday card from Rob and the kitties, which I thought I would share:
I think that if Pepper were to write a birthday card, this is exactly what it would say!
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