Middle Reef and Lone Metridium

I have a friend at work, Tom, who has been diving a few times in the Caribbean, but never in colder water.  He's been talking about wanting to go diving with us here since last summer.  In the past couple of months, we finally managed to get it together, and he did a little refresher in the pool with Rob.  So we scheduled a dive date at Lobos.  It's been a while since I've been to Lobos.  I guess I got a little Lobos'd out when we were getting up to speed on the rebreathers (I guess I'm still getting up to speed on the 'breather, but now I've at least moved on to boat diving :P).  As usual on a Saturday at Lobos, there were quite a few other BAUE people there, so we chit-chatted with everyone for a while.

We got pretty lucky in terms of conditions, considering we had a new diver with us.  Getting in and out at the ramp wasn't a problem for anyone.  For the first dive, we went to Middle Reef.  We swam out to about the worm patch, and dropped there.  We headed out the sand channel, and then hopped over to the reef somewhere around nudibranch transect 5.  The viz was pretty good, but not great, and there wasn't much surge.  We tried to show Tom some of the highlights of Middle Reef, like the wolf eel's den, and tried to find the transect 4 warbonnet.  He was pretty good at finding stuff that he thought was cool to look at too.  He was pretty fond of the Urticinas.  We made it all the way to the end of Middle Reef before it was time to turn the dive.  I brought us back around the back side of Middle Reef, up on top of it, and then cut back over to the west side at transect 4.  From there, we headed to the sand channel and came straight in.  We surfaced a bit south of the worm patch.

Tom was super excited about the dive (Tom is excited about everything; he's in sales), and eager to do a second dive.  So after a bit of a surface interval and some snacks, we got back in for a second dive.  We decided to try to make it to Lone Metridium on the second dive.  We knew it was a bit of a stretch, but figured even if we didn't make it, it would be a nice area to go for the second dive.  We swam out a bit further on the surface on this dive, and followed along the reef-sand interface on the left side of the sand channel.  We paused at Hole in the Wall to show the hole to Tom.  Then we continued out through the kelp just north of there, and bounced along from ridge to ridge.  We did make it to the Lone Metridium, who was unfortunately closed for business.  But we managed to find a little bit of hydrocoral to show to Tom while we were out there.

It was time to turn it, so we headed back.  Once we got past Hole in the Wall, we stayed to the west of the sand channel, and swam in over the rubbly reef there instead of straight up the sand channel.  We made it back to the sand channel and ascended there.  We headed to La Tortuga with Matt and Kevin for lunch (and ended up joining some other BAUE people that we ran into there).