It was another flat winter day on the ocean, and we were able to make it down to Sur 19. It's funny to think about how we used to consider there to be a "season" for diving Big Sur, and would only ever try to do trips down there in August and September (with a ton of pre-planning). In the past couple of years, we've managed to make it down there during the winter months a handful of times. I guess that's a benefit of having a tech boat scheduled almost every weekend, so we can pick the flat days and go.
So today we made it down to Sur 19. As is often the case at Big Sur in the winter, the viz was excellent. And there was a lot of hydrocoral, though I guess that's the case in the summer too :) We did the usual circle around the top of the pinnacle with some photos. There were a fair number of fish out, both adult and juvenile rockfish, but nothing too crazy.
At least one member of Team Kitty has been known to, in recent times, make heretical statements along the lines of "Sur 19, again?", preferring to go to less awesome dive sites in the name of variety. But it's not like we see the same things just because we're at the same dive site on a different day. Today, I saw something interesting that I've never seen at Sur 19. Pretty late into the dive, all of a sudden it seemed like the fish all got a lot more active. There were little groups of fish of all kinds, including perch, rockfish big and small, suddenly zipping around on the top of the pinnacle. It made me regret that I wasn't videoing. A minute later, I figured out why the fish were suddenly so active; there were sea lions diving down and hunting on top of the pinnacle, chasing the fish around. We watched this for a bit, and then saw that there were some cormorants joining in the hunt too. Kind of weird to see this at these depths.
After the dive, since it was still quite calm and no one wanted to do a second dive, Rob wanted to check out some mark he had found on the bathymetry, which was in the vicinity. We drove over it, and I guess it looked interesting enough, so he wanted to do a bounce on it, to see if there was anything there. I sat out the dive, since I was umm, skeptical. Skeptical about the likelihood of the site being worth a dive, and also skeptical of the post-tech-dive bounce :) Turns out, there was nothing there. While Rob and Kevin were in the water (for maybe 15 minutes total), the conditions suddenly turned pretty snotty. In the space of 5 minutes, it went from really nice to the boat rocking around. So once they were back on the boat, we got out of there.
It was another flat winter day on the ocean, and we were able to make it down to Sur 19. It's funny to think about how we used to consider there to be a "season" for diving Big Sur, and would only ever try to do trips down there in August and September (with a ton of pre-planning). In the past couple of years, we've managed to make it down there during the winter months a handful of times. I guess that's a benefit of having a tech boat scheduled almost every weekend, so we can pick the flat days and go.
So today we made it down to Sur 19. As is often the case at Big Sur in the winter, the viz was excellent. And there was a lot of hydrocoral, though I guess that's the case in the summer too :) We did the usual circle around the top of the pinnacle with some photos. There were a fair number of fish out, both adult and juvenile rockfish, but nothing too crazy.
After the dive, since it was still quite calm and no one wanted to do a second dive, Rob wanted to check out some mark he had found on the bathymetry, which was in the vicinity. We drove over it, and I guess it looked interesting enough, so he wanted to do a bounce on it, to see if there was anything there. I sat out the dive, since I was umm, skeptical. Skeptical about the likelihood of the site being worth a dive, and also skeptical of the post-tech-dive bounce :) Turns out, there was nothing there. While Rob and Kevin were in the water (for maybe 15 minutes total), the conditions suddenly turned pretty snotty. In the space of 5 minutes, it went from really nice to the boat rocking around. So once they were back on the boat, we got out of there.
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