Mile Buoy and Shale Island

Photo by Clinton Bauder

It was once again one of those weekends where the forecast pretty much promised that we'd be diving in the bay.  But there was a surprising amount of enthusiasm for going diving anyway.  Well, the forecast wasn't lying, and we ended up at Mile Buoy.  Since we were sure we would end up in the bay, we didn't bring scooters.  Which was maybe a mistake, since there was actually a bit of current at Mile Buoy.  At the beginning of the dive, we were just sort of meandering around, letting the current drag us along.  We ended up off of the main site, looking at sea pens in the sand.  When we decided to head back to the main site, it was a bit of a pain swimming against the current!  So once we got back to the main structure, we pretty much just stayed there, to avoid having to schlep back through the current again :)  It was pretty much the usual Mile Buoy suspects, including some basket stars.

For the second dive, we went to Shale Island.  It seems like we've done a lot of second dives there recently.  Anyhoo, we circumnavigated the island, or well, I think we did.  Eventually we had been going for what seemed like plenty enough time that we should have passed back over the anchor line, but we hadn't seen it.  Rob was sure it was just a few more minutes ahead, so we kept going a few more minutes, then after not finding it, there was a bit of swimming around looking for it, and finally I suggested we just pop a bag, because well, we'd been looking for a while and not found it.  So we had to face the shame of coming up on a bag.  In order to draw attention away from that, I missed the boat on the first two pickup attempts :)  It was really windy!

No pictures from Rob, so I borrowed one from Clinton.