Not Diving Twin Peaks

On Sunday we were planning a nice long dive to Twin Peaks. We schlepped a ton of gear (6 bottles and 2 scooters) to the float, then we schlepped ourselves and Rob's camera into the water. We got all of the bottles on and headed out on the surface. About a minute into the surface scoot, my scooter started making a terribly noise. It was grumbling sort of like when the battery is about to cutoff but not quite the same. Plus the noise was continuous. At first I was wondering if my prop was scraping against the shroud. I took a look and that didn't not seem to be the case. I handed the scooter to Rob, and he took a look. At first he couldn't reproduce the sound, and then I don't know if he finally did, but then the scooter just crapped out entirely. Hmph! So we headed back to the float. Rob didn't even offer me a tow, so I had to swim back with 3 bottles and a bum scooter, hmph. When we got back to the float, Rob got out with my scooter and opened it up and doinked around with it for a few minutes, and determined that it was just dead, and the fuse on the battery was blown. Not a good sign.

We debated for a few minutes whether to do a kick dive to middle reef or what. Eventually we decided to do that, though Rob scootered out and towed me, until we got to about 30' at middle reef. Then we just kicked out along the west side. We stopped to look for the wolf eels and they were not in. Then we stopped to look for the transect 4 warbonnet, and couldn't find it. The piece of palm kelp that was long the landmark that we used to find him was gone. Rob searched around a bit without any success. So we eventually moved along. The wall north of there has a lot of ugly barnacles all over everything. It makes the wall much less attractive than I remembered it, so hopefully they will go away soon! And I wouldn't mind if some Onchidoris bilamellata came along to help with that. We eventually made our way to the end, to transect 2 as we call it. I poked around under the overhang there, looking for anything of interest. After I got past the transect (to the east of it, just past the little vertical crack), I found an insanely cute little fish, which was probably the highlight of my dive. I'm not sure what he was, but as I told Rob after the dive, he was definitely of the genus Muppet. You know what I mean when I say a fish looks muppety -- he might have been an Irish Lord, or something like that. I also found a giant vermilion rockfish lurking near that crack.

From there, we came over the top of the wall, and swam in on top of middle reef. There were some big lingcods up there, as there tend to be. After swimming in on top for a bit, we came back down the wall on the east side, and swam in that little sand channel on the east side. Eventually we popped back over to the west side, and when we got back to like 30 feet, I headed to the sand channel and we scooted in. At about 15 feet, the viz was getting pretty bad, so I suggested we ascend, and we surface scooted in from there.

Not exactly the dive we planned, but I liked the muppet fish.