Surge and Icky Viz at Lobos

Rob and I had Lobos tickets, and it turned out that so did Matt and Leah, so we decided to all do a dive together.  I think I've become a bit spoiled by the good viz at Lobos on my last few dives, but this brought me back to reality... the viz was pretty icky, I would normally call bad viz "green" but really I think it was more like brown :)  It wasn't like viz so bad you couldn't keep a team together, or navigate to the usual spots, but it was just pretty icky.

We basically did a tour of the usual spots on the "left" side, including Three Sisters, Beto's Reef, and then we headed back to the Lone Metridium area.  There were a fair number of blue rockfish hanging out at the Sisters, but that was about the only thing of note out there.  Back around Lone Metridium, it was quite surgy and viz was pretty brown.  But we were poking around there for a bit, including paying a visit to the GPO near there.  I was having fun watching the NDL time on my JJ controller.  So, for better or worse, the controller has a deco computer in it, which as far as I can tell, cannot be switched to a gauge mode.  This can be annoying for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is that I haven't paid for the VPM module, so I'm using Buhlmann, though I typically dive more or less VPM).  But it's also kind of entertaining to watch how the computer behaves as you move shallower.  As we headed in from the Sisters, I was perilously close (hahaha) to going into deco, but then once we got to 60 feet, I had basically unlimited NDL time.  So anyway, the fact that I was having fun watching my computer tick time away from NDL is an indicator of the quality of the dive.

Eventually the surge got to Leah, so Matt and Leah decided to head in, and we split into two teams.  We poked around the area a bit longer, and then Rob suggested we make a quick run over to Granite Point.  I wasn't too interested in going there, since I figured it would be damn surgy, but he just wanted to say hello to the GPO over there.  So we zipped over there, it was in fact damn surgy, and we said hello to the GPO and then headed back in.  We had been planning to do a practice ascent from the end of Middle Reef, which I tried to wave off, but Rob gave me a look, so we did it.  I felt quite un-spazzy on this dive, a first since I'd started diving the RB, and I didn't want to ruin that with a spazzy ascent :)  The ascent went very well though, so I guess I didn't ruin it.  After the dive, when I told Rob my reasoning, he correctly thought it was really lame.  After that, we went back to the bottom and came in the sand channel to finish the dive.

After packing up, we headed to RG Burger for some lunch and mediocre service.  While we were there, there was a flurry of text messages and phone calls about the boat on Sunday.  There was a tech charter on Sunday, with a pretty light load and a pretty bad forecast.  So there was some discussion about whether the boat should go.  Then I got email announcing that the boat was cancelled.  Rob and I were staying down in Monterey for the night, so we still wanted to dive.  We called Jim and decided to go out on the boat anyway, and just bring gear for an in-the-bay dive as a backup, if the conditions were as bad as the forecast predicted.  With that decided, we headed to the Quality Inn to checkin, and then over to the Taste of Monterey for some wine and wifi.  I wanted to get some work done in the afternoon, so I was thinking we could take our laptops to Starbucks, but then we had the idea to go to Taste of Monterey instead.  Coding from a wine bar is a brilliant innovation.