BAUE Rec Boat

Photo by Clinton Bauder

Saturday was the March BAUE recreational boat.  Somehow I ended up organizing this one.  The forecast was looking pretty horrendous in the middle of the week... does this sound familiar?  So we were keeping a close eye on the forecast, to see if the boat should even attempt to go, but by Friday afternoon, the forecast was not too horrible.  8 to 10 foot swell and 10 knot winds, or something.  But building in the afternoon.  We also got a report of good viz in the bay, though, so I figured we could get a couple of dives in.  When we got down to Monterey, the flag was at attention, though once again pointing out to sea.  And it started to rain just as we got off the highway.  Jim said that it had been really windy, but the wind direction was changing and we were basically in the lull before it got really windy again.  So we were hoping to make it to Carmel for at least one dive.  The conditions turned out to not be too bad on the way down (at least I didn't think so).  We made it around Point Pinos without any problem.  There were fairly big, long period swells, but the wind was not too bad.  Just the occasional whitecap.

Photo by Clinton Bauder

We pulled up to East Pinnacle and were told to get the heck in the water, so we could get out of there before conditions got too much worse.  So that is what we did.  I was diving with Rob and Clinton.  Rob was shooting macro and Clinton was shooting wide angle.  Clinton definitely made the better choice, at least for this dive.  The water color and viz were good, probably 30 to 40 feet.  I started to see fish (on top of the pinnacle) at like 20 feet on the way down.  It was crazy surgy though.  Not continuously, but every couple of minutes the surge machine would be turned on and we'd be dragged back and forth across the reef, and then eventually set back down, maybe where we started, or maybe not :)  So, needless to say, Rob didn't do much with his camera.  Clinton led us around on a little tour of the best hydrocoral spots at the site (all those rocks look the same to me), and then we circled back to the little school of blue rockfish that we saw at the beginning.  I just hung out atop the pinnacle in the washing machine while Clinton took pictures of them.  We had scooters (because Rob wanted to test out his just-back-from-service motor), which made it slightly less scary to be churned about next to the pinnacle, because if rock was rapidly approaching my face, I could always scooter out of it.  About 40 minutes into the dive, I noticed that all of the other teams had departed up the anchor line, and Clinton had just finished up taking pictures of a patch of hydrocoral, so we thumbed it.  When we surfaced, it was windier, but not so rough as to make reboarding the boat any big thang.

Photo by Clinton Bauder

Once we were back on board, we headed back to the bay.  Conditions had certainly deteriorated, but the worst thing about the ride back was that it was insanely cold, and the wind did not help in this respect.  I really need to get some giant ear muffs or a hat with ear flaps for winter boats (now that the winter is nearly over... I hope).  I was wondering on the ride back if it was actually colder on the surface than in the water.  I couldn't believe it was, but then as I was gearing up for the second dive, I noticed that on the surface, my gauge recorded a temperature of 44 degrees, whereas the water on the first dive had been a not too cold 50 degrees.  No wonder it was so freakin' cold on the ride back from Carmel!  We pulled up behind the aquarium, to Hopkins.  As far as I know, we weren't given any choices for the dive, but Jim said there should not be surge here.  And that the reports were that there was good viz.

Photo by Robert Lee

I jumped in first, and looked down and the viz was really good on top.  As we descended, there was a distinct layer in the water right around 30 feet, where it went from blue to green (and there was a lot of "stuff" in the water right around that layer) but at the bottom, the viz was still quite good.  Again I'd call it 30 to 40 feet, bright, but a bit green.  Definitely really good viz for the bay.  We just meandered around the site, looking for critters, and posing for pictures with the metridiums.  We had a lot more success on finding macro critters on this dive -- the lack of surge (for the most part) helped a lot.  I found a pretty small wolf eel just poking his head out of a crack.  I was above a structure that had a several feet deep crack running across the top and ending at the side.  So if you were facing the side, you would see a vertical crack.  Anyway, I looked down in the the crack from on top, and saw grey.  Hmmm.  I wasn't even sure if his head was sticking out of the side before I signaled Rob to point out that there was a wolf eel down there.  But sure enough, when I swam over to the edge of the rock and dropped down along the side, there he was, just peeking out.  Team Bunny was nearby, so we dragged them over to look at the eel too.

Photo by Robert Lee

Eventually we moved on from that and swam across some sand to another pile of boulders (maybe those rocks are too big to be called boulders).  Rob and Clinton swam right over a little rock pile on the bottom with a not-very-small red octopus among the rocks.  He wasn't really hidden at all, except that he was completely frozen with his legs tucked under him along the side of a rock, and he totally blended in with the rock.  I signaled Rob, who swam back. I circled the octo with my light.  He looked straight at it, paused, and then looked back at me like "huh?"  Then I circled it again and he finally realized he was staring at an octopus.  Then he started taking some pictures.  Once he was finished with some pictures, I got a little closer (didn't want to spook him before Rob got pictures). I did spook him a bit, but he just moved, out onto the sand, extending his legs and changing color to blend into the sand.  So then Rob took more pictures of him.  Eventually John, Carol, and Teresa came by and we showed them the octopus.  We eventually left him alone, and not too long after that, Rob found another, smaller octopus, which by the time I came along was totally hidden in a crack.  But I could peer into it and see him there.  We finally headed back to where we started, near the anchor line.  That area seemed to be filled with lingcod.  There was one really big one, which was either the same one we had seen on the way down to the site or there were two big ones, and lots of medium to small ones, and one really tiny one that was so cute I wanted to pinch his cheeks.  Clinton also found a big cabezon, stuffed into an odd position along a crack, basically head down.  He was a pretty strange color, almost a fluorescent green.  It was a pretty nice find.

Photo by Robert Lee

After that, we thumbed the dive, and headed up the line, which we were right next to.  When we surfaced, there were whitecaps all around us.  As I was waiting at the swimstep, Jim pointed out to me that I was trailing a little line of oil droplets, because my compass had been smashed.  I noticed a bubble in it before the first dive, which I didn't remember being there, but I didn't look at it too closely.  I guess that was fairly dumb of me.  Upon closer inspection, there was a web of small cracks emanating from the center.  I suspect it got smashed in my luggage on the way back from Florida.  I didn't notice it wasn't working in the water, because on the first dive I used the compass on my scooter, and on the second dive I didn't use my compass at all :)  Anyhoo, we got back on the boat and then headed back to K-dock, by which point it was raining really hard.  We headed to the Chowder House, and then to Anywater to, among other things, replace my compass.

All of the day's pictures are here.