Birthday Wall

Sometimes I do a dive that is so great that I find it difficult to write a report about it -- because the report can't possibly do it justice. This dive is just such a dive. And this is why it's taken me over two weeks to post about one of the coolest dives I've done in a while. Well, I hope that hasn't ruined the suspense about how the dive went, but here's the report. I commissioned Rob to setup some diving for my birthday weekend. Phil was available, yay, but we couldn't get Lobos tickets for Saturday so we settled for a Friday dive instead. This actually worked out well sine there was a somewhat last-minute BAUE boat on Saturday that we could go on too. I kept telling Rob that I needed to figure out where to go, but never got to it and eventually suggested that Rob make a suggestion. I was just too busy tom study the bathymetry maps in the week before the dive. He told me he had a mark for a site from 150 feet to 300 feet. I was doubtful and when he gave me the numbers, it looked more like it was a pinnacle from like 150 to 220ish next to a wall that went deeper. So we could check out the wall and then come up the pinnacle. This was all a few minutes scootering from the Dos Gatos area, so we figured we could finish up on the shallower structures there. Nice easy dive plan, huh?

The weather was very cooperative and we got to Yankee Point without too much trouble. It was actually kind of snotty coming around Point Lobos; in fact, I asked if Phil could take over the boat-driving from Rob, because it was a bit scary. They both ignored me and once we were around the point, it was a smoother ride. When we got near the site, Phil was eyeing the depth-sounder skeptically because it was pretty consistently reading 230ish without any sign of structure. Rob promised him that a small pinnacle top would suddenly shoot up to 150 and he was right we suddenly saw a plateau in the 180 rand and the it abruptly got shallower, peaking at 149 (at which we cheered and dropped the hook) and then got deeper again. The boat seemed kind of empty with just the two of us, even though we had a ton of gear. We got geared up and did all of our checks. We reviewed the plan, go here then here then here, but did not reviewed the bottom or deco profile, since it was the same profile we always do for these 15/55 Massively Multilevel Dives. We rolled into the water and found very little surface current and nice viz, on the top anyway. We headed down, met up at 20 feet for a bubble check, and continued down the line, which took forever because of my ears. Around 100 feet they started to behave. The viz was still good, though it was dark. I was looking below me waiting and waiting to see a pinnacle and around 140 feet I finally looked up and realized there was a pinnacle, towering above me, but the side we anchored on was so steep that looking down the anchor line, I didn't see the structure :).


The pinnacle actually came up to like 130' but it was this skinny spire poking up that shallow, which doesn't appear on the bathymetry. Then there was a plateau of sorts at like 170 or 180 before that sloped down deeper. We got to the plateau and regrouped. Rob was giving me a somewhat mysterious hand signal which I thought was a signal to reset my bottom timer (or at least note the time), since the uber-slow descent had eaten up like 5 minutes. I had already noted the time so I gave him the okay and we headed down the structure. Rob's initial claim about the profile was actually pretty accurate. The site was not really a pinnacle next to a wall. When you head down the side of the pinnacle you end up in 250' looking down, without really covering any horizontal distance. On the boat, Phil had been telling us about a ratfish he had seen a few days before. And what do you know, as we were looking at the sand below us, Rob signaled me excitedly to point out a ratfish below us. He immediately scurried down to get a look (and a picture... He brought the 60mm so the ratfish was a good subject). I was hanging above him, pondering how deep I wanted to go to see a ratfish, when I saw an interesting purple splotch on the sand, about 15 feet from Rob. It was round with little round bulges laying in the sand around it. It was a GPO laying completely out in the open on the sand! Just laying there. Once I convinced myself that there really was a GPO just laying in the sand I signaled Rob and pointed it out to him. He quickly lost interest in the ratfish and we both headed to the octopus. He was very friendly and I even let him suction one leg onto my hand for a bit. Two of his front tentacles were short and looked like they had been cut off. I guess the friendly octopus met another not so friendly creature. He slowly slithered across the sand with us until we ended up at a little structure across the sand, which was pretty fishy, and the octopus slithered up the structure. Rob started to take some pictures but I quickly suggested that we should head up a bit shallower. He nodded sadly.


We headed back to the main wall and then headed along that toward the deeper end of it. There was a current pushing us in that direction so we were pretty much just drifting along. The octopus encounter was just the beginning of an awesome dive. There were three really cool things about this dive. First, the topography was just cool. For a while, we were drifting along the wall at 250' looking down and not seeing the bottom. My guess is that the bottom is at at least 300'. The viz was good but it was DARK so difficult to say. Next time I come here I will bring a deeper gas so I can find out. Second, the fish life was amazing. We saw dozens of lingcods, many on the small side but a few (mostly shallower) pretty large ones too. Then there were the rockfish. There were tons of rockfish of all sizes. Lots of schools of juveniles. At one point we drifted over a boulder with a bunch of redfish on top of it. I thought at least some were yelloweyes, but as I lit it up, they all scattered into a crack. When I swam up to the crack there were at least a dozen stafford piled up against each other, and a couple yelloweyes I think. They were just crammed in there. I looked back to Rob to show him, and saw the one lone fish that didn't scatter was a bocaccio, and looking off into the distance, I realized I was staring at a school (!) of bocaccio. I didn't even know they came in schools :). There were also lots of big vermilions, several little groups of canaries, and plenty of fish that I don't even know what they were. Rob got pictures of two such mystery fish, which are (according to Tom Laidig) a sharpchin and a Pygmy -- both new-to-me rockfish, I think. After consulting my map, I was relieved to see that this spot is in a no-take area. Finally, the invertebrate life at this site was unusually good for this depth.  At a lot of sites, below 200', the invertebrate cover just isn't as impressive.  This is true, for instance, at Mount Chamberlain.  But at this site, it was really very covered all the way down to 250'.  All in all, an awesome site.  I can't wait to go back.

Eventually we agreed to turn around and head up a bit shallower.  I figured we started out a bit deep so it would be good to finish up a bit shallower.  But Rob seemed to be in a hurry to get up to 190', and as soon as we were there, he signaled me to switch.  I didn't understand why, since we still have 5 minutes left for out deep segment, but whatever.  Turns out, there was a bit of confusion about what the bottom profile was supposed to be :)  Rob thought we were doing 20/20, when the plan had been 25/15.  Oops.  Oh well.  We hung around on the spire for a few minutes and then decided to head out into mid-water, to look for shallower structure.  We were scootering over nothing for a couple minutes, with literally nothing in site in any direction, when finally I saw some structures below me, and eventually it got shallower and we landed on a pinnacle.  We quickly discovered that it wasn't Dos Gatos, because the pinnacle came up to 70'.  It was a nice spot, though it had quite a few barnacles on it.  I even saw a head of hydrocoral covered in barnacles :(  I think I identified this pinnacle on the bathy maps, but I have no idea if it is a named site.  We worked our way up the pinnacle, and switched onto our 70' bottles, then put up a bag and left the pinnacle.  I was joking with Rob before the dive that without Kevin, how would we put up a bag?  I drew the short straw, and Rob was left unimpressed with my bag shoot.  The line got caught on my glove as it was unspooling, and I had to give it a good flick to get it off, and then had to swim after the spool as it got dragged away from me.  Oops.  Maybe I need to shoot the bag more often.

Deco was uneventful and so was our retrieval by Phil.  Conditions seemed quite a bit calmer on the way back, as we regaled Phil with tales of our epic dive.  I can't wait to go back to that spot :)  I think it is the best 15/55 dive site that I have dived.  It needs a name, and I really don't feel up to the task of naming such an awesome site.  I just can't think of anything that does it justice.  So for now I am calling it "Birthday Wall" for lack of a better name.

Rob was sad that we saw a GPO while he was shooting macro, but I love the octopus eye shot!  It's so funny looking.

Que Paso

On Saturday, I was supposed to dive with Matt and Leah on Phil's boat. When they arrived at Lobos, Leah wasn't feeling well so she decided to stay at Lobos. So it was just me and Matt with 32%. Very strange going out with Phil like that. I had packed an O2 bottle, because I always figure it could be of use on the boat or in the car, but definitely won't be of use in my garage. Phil had an O2 bottle as well, so we decided to bring those along so that we had the option of doing something deeper/longer. While discussing site options, I randomly mentioned Que Paso and that is what we settled on.

Phil made me drive the boat which I am not really a fan of. But we managed to launch it and retrieve Phil without crashing into anything or running over any divers. This was the first time I experienced Phil's new engines. They are very quiet which makes it hard not to punch it, since you don't have the sound feedback. The forecast had looked pretty good, but it was actually a bit of a rough ride. It was also overcast which always makes it seem rougher than it is. We got to the site and it was a mysteriously calm patch just around there. We got geared up, in the oddly empty boar and flopped into the water. Phil reminded us that we would have to use our fins, not our trigger fingers, to get down the line today :). He also suggested that we come up the line instead of drifting if possible (i.e. there wasn't too much current). There actually was a little bit of current on the way down but nothing too bad.

The anchor was right next to a little crack that I recognized -- Rob has a picture of Susan from that spot. But it wasnt nearly as nice looking now because of the barnacle invasion. We headed down the pinnacle until we found one of the more vertical sides. There were white barnacles everywhere On the boat Phil had been talking about how there was a sister pinnacle that we could swim to. I got the impression that it was far enough away that we would only see it in really good viz. But we quickly spied this other pinnacle just across the sand from the wall that we were on. So we went to take a look. It was pretty neat; it was surprisingly barren of white barnacles (it was not as covered in general as the main pinnacle). In the center if the pinnacle there was a crater of sorts which I thought made it look like a volcano. Back on the boat Phil referred to this as an "amphitheater" which is an excellent description. There was a school of blues on this pinnacle, and there were some bug blues hanging out down in the amphitheater.

We headed back to the main pinnacle and circumnavigated it. I sort of felt like the whole dive, we were swimming around looking for a better spot -- one with something other than barnacles on it! I swam right over a couple of cabezons that I didn't even see until I spooked then and they took off. The last one that we came across bolted and then started acting really territorial toward us. So I figured there had to be a pile of eggs somewhere... Then I looked back at the spot that it had bolted from and sure enough there were eggs. So I guess he was guarding a best but not very well :). That spot was actually right on the edge of a crack with a bunch of hydrocoral -- so at least one scenic spot was left. I saw a couple of kelp greenlings acting territorial too but didn't find any nests.

We eventually ended up back on the wall where we started, and found one vertical stripe that was completely encrusted with corynactis and colorful sponges, and no white barnacles. It was odd because right next to it was a big swath of barnacles. So we hung out there until it was time to go shallower. Eventually we did head shallower and did a couple of loops around the top of the pinnacle. I expected to eventually wander past the anchor line but we never did. When we wanted to head up we actually started looking for it. I eventually found myself back at that recognizable crack which I was sure was where the anchor had been. But no anchor and no line. We gave up and shot a bag instead. We did a little deco at 20 feet. While we were there, Matt found a really cool critter. It was very similar to the "jelly bird" I saw once before but his one had some extra processes on it's back... making it look slug-like. When we surfaced, I told Phil that the anchor line eluded us. Turnout the anchor slipped, so he reset it, and then it slipped again, so he gave up. He claimed the weather picked up while we were in the water but then it calmed down again before we surfaced. Seems like that happens a lit in Phil's boat :). We told Phil about the jelly animal and he said it sounded like a sea angel. I finally got around to looking it up and that's definitely what my jelly bird was, and I suspect that the one we saw on this dive was some sort of sea angel too (but almost all of the pictures that I can find are of the one type with a smooth back).

The ride back was calmer than the ride down. When we got back to Lobos, Leah was feeling better so we headed to RG for lunch.

Mount Chamberlain South Annex

Jim wanted to go diving on Labor Day so of course we joined him. It was supposed to be a pretty full boat, but in the end it was just Jim, Kevin, Rob and me. Having successfully made it down to Point Sur on Saturday, we decided to try again (but hopefully dive Big Sur Banks). We made it all the way to Sur 19 in what I would consider significant wind. There were whitecaps not too far south of Lobos. I was pretty surprised that we bothered to keep going, but we did. Not too surprisingly, once we were there, we decided it was not diveable. Well, Rob pulled his usual "we can dive this" nonsense, but Jim and I were pretty convinced otherwise. Actually, I'm sure we could dive it, it was just the getting back on the boat part that I was not so sure about :)

So we headed north for a calmer spot. The ride back up was unpleasant and a bit scary at times. We got back to Yankee Point and it was pretty calm there. In fact it was calmer than I remembered from the way down, though that was perhaps in comparison from the ride to Big Sur. We decided to anchor on the south wall of Mount Chamberlain, and "if the viz is good" go to the south annex... The wall that runs parallel to the south wall a couple hundred feet south across the sand. I think that Jim had not been to that spot before, but I love the spot. Maybe that's because we only go there in good viz :). We dropped down to find really bad viz on the wall. It was green and dark and chunky, and keeping the team of four together was annoying.

After a few minutes on the wall, heading west, we found a basket star on one of the boulders at the bottom of the wall. After checking him out, Rob suggested we head to the annex. The viz was crap but I figured why not... you can't really get lost between here and there. So we headed over the sand and in a little over a minute we saw the reef, phew. We landed on a familiar spot and were looking around at the fish when we got a light signal from Kevin. It was a rather excited light signal, so I was thinking "that had better be a GPO!" And it was! At the very bottom of the wall there was a little overhanging ledge, with a GPO under it. He had one arm completely outstretched, hanging out from the overhang. I think he was waving to us. Even though he was under a ledge, we had a pretty good view of him, and he was pretty active. We took terms swimming over to the opening to get a good look at him. By the time we were done with him, it was nearly time to head shallower, so we headed back north to the south wall. We came up the wall and headed north toward K2. We never actually found the shallow K2 peak, but we found a spot that came up to 110 or 120. I thought we should just hang out there instead if spending the rest of our bottom time futilely looking for a shallower peak to come up. So we hung around there for a few minutes before Rob got restless and suggested we search around a bit more. So we did, and it was futile :). One thing I did notice as we scootered around is that as soon as we got to 120 or 130, I started to see those evil white barnacles. Grumble. They are everywhere!

Deco was uneventful. There was the usual assortment of unnamable deco critters. At 20 feet Rob and Kevin decided that my gauge is broken. Apparently it is off by a couple feet compared to theirs so I kept finding myself a couple feet deeper than them. I think their gauges are the broken ones!

Planet Roxy and White Wall

 We were on a tech boat on Saturday and the forecast looked great. So of course the plan was to go south until the weather dictated otherwise. We made it to Point Sur and then discussed where to go. Jim had numbers for some new site (not sure where the numbers came from) and he called it Roxy something. I can't remember the rest of the name, so I've decided to call it Planet Roxy, for no particular reason. Anyhoo, the site was storied to be about as far out as Midway but a bit south of that. Or maybe it was north, I always get those confused. The profile was also supposed to be similar to midway, with the top in the 120 range and the bottom less than 200.

We dropped into excellent viz and not much surface current, but as we descended, we saw the line flatten out and then were greeted by an impressive current. Also, viz was quite green and murky at the bottom. Where we first dropped, there was a nice wall from maybe 130 to 180 or so. We dropped down the wall and Rob attempts some shots in the current. I found a Crinoid at 180'! That is by far the shallowest I have seen one locally. It was on the side of the wall, leaned over in the current. Poor little Crinoid.

We scootered around a bit to try to find more structure but eventually gave up and headed back. We saw a bunch of bigger red rockfish (including some yelloweyes) much like we have seen at Midway. Near the end we found a nice little crack with some hydrocoral for Rob to shoot. That part of the reef topped at like 120 feet making it a good multilevel option. All in all I would go to Midway over this site in the future... It has the same sort of fishlife but much better structure.



We headed back north and decided to try a "new" spot near Cypress Point. Beto has been wanting to look at this site for a while. Clinton said he was pretty sure he had dived it once a while ago. It was a well supposedly coming up to 60 and dropping off to like 130. Kevin had not brought a 32 stage so he sat this one out (despite my many strokey ideas for how we could cobble together the bottles we had so that we could all dive). The viz totally sucked on the top of the structure (which was not quite as shallow as reported). We headed down the wall, on backgas, which had slightly better viz. Also, further down the wall we escaped the barnacles (which were everywhere in the shallows). There were some nice hydrocoral bushes. Sort of like locals ledge deep was how Clinton described it.

Little Cow Canyon

There were back-to-back BAUE tech boats this weekend. We were on the Saturday boat, which was slated to do a 15/55 dive. Earlier in the week, there was talk of potentially switching to 18/45 so we could make a run for Big Sur Banks. There seemed to be a general ambivalence about what to do, so we stuck with the original plan, and hoped that the fog that had been hanging around all week would go away for the weekend. It turns out we made the right decision. When we got down to Monterey on Saturday morning, there was fog. The middle of the bay was pretty fog-free, but we could see (or not see, rather) that there was thick fog out by Point Pinos. Jim had driven down the coast to see whether it cleared up in Carmel, and reported that there was thick fog all the way down to Yankee Point. Hmph. So we decided to adjourn for breakfast and come back a bit later, in hopes that the fog would have lifted. We headed to the breakfast club, where I had some very tasty French toast with strawberries. This was definitely risky, since I am usually pretty strict about what I will and will not eat before a significant deco dive; and French toast with strawberries is definitely not on the "will" side of the list. By the time we got back to the dock, it was about 10. The fog situation looked better in the bay, but looking south from K-dock, we could see fog in the hills. We decided to go out and take a look anyway. On the way out of the bay, the fog seemed to be lifting, and between Point Pinos and Cypress Point, it was really clear. It looked good enough that we all decided it was worth it to put our drysuits on. Just after Cypress Point, we encountered a wall of fog, but then a bit south of there was better.

We made it down to Lobos and started to discuss our options. We decided to look at Yankee Point and if that wouldn't work, we would retreat to the E3 area, and if that wouldn't work, back to the Outer Outer Pinnacles area. Once we passed Lobos the wind really kicked up and by the time we got to Yankee Point, we pretty much turned around without discussion. By the time we got back to Lobos, even there it was quite windy, with whitecaps about. Jim was worried about the direction of the wind and the potential to drift into the rocks, so we headed back to the OOP area. It was pretty freakin' windy at this point, and I was feeling pretty negative about the idea of getting into the water with 3 bottles, a process I do not particularly enjoy even in the best conditions. Luckily, when we got back to the OOP area, the water was dead calm. I guess Cypress Point was protecting us from the wind? We circled and circled and discussed our plans. Jim had some mark in his GPS which Rob had given to him, that was supposedly a spot from 160' to 230'. But no one had actually dived it. After discussing our options (which included some strange ones), we eventually settled on dropping the downline on that spot, and planning to spend the dive there (that is, not heading to the next shallower pinnacle at the end of the dive, which had been one of the options). So we finally got geared up while the line was set. Rob was looking a bit green during the process of gearing up, most likely from circling while we decided what to do, and at some point while we were getting ready, he made a bucket deposit. Ewww.

Normally when doing a 3 bottle dive on the Escapade, I have a crew member clip my O2 bottle to my leash when I am standing on (or one step from) the swim step. Today I decided to just clip it off while seated, since it's only like an extra 3 steps with the bottle. When we were ready to go, Michael and I hoisted me up and then Michael practically collapsed in laughter as I trudged to the swimstep, looking like a bottle monster. I didn't even bother to hold the O2 bottle, I just let it drag along. Probably not very good for the boat deck, but it worked well for me. Rob pointed out that my other bottles were sort of bouncing around against the valve/reg on the O2 bottle, so it probably wasn't very good for my gear either. Oops. Anyhoo, I got into the water and grabbed my scooter. It was super calm with very little surface current. Rob and Kevin were getting their stuff sorted out when I told them I would meet them on the line. Then I attempted to scooter down to the line, from about 10 feet away from the ball. Silly me. The viz was like 3 feet, so there was no way I was going to find the line from that far away :) I had to return to the surface, go to the ball on the surface, and follow the line down. We got to 20 feet and did bubble checks. Rob told me my right post was bubbling, and told me to hold while he monkeyed with it. It was very reminiscent of T2, having to fix a post on the way down at 20 feet. Once that was sorted out, we headed down. As I mentioned the viz was crap near the surface. But below about 30 or 40 feet, it was really good. Not epic, but very good. We came to the top of the structure at about 160 feet. The ball was actually in a little sand channel between the main structure and another mini pinnacle.

We were on the north side of a ridge that ran, for the most part, east-west. We headed west along the edge of the ridge, since we knew that was the deeper end. Along the way to the west end, we saw a Diaulula lentiginosa, two of those weird reddish carrot-shaped deco creatures (this was the first time I saw one on the bottom), a couple of starry rockfish, and some vase sponges. When we got to the end, there were several parallel fingers of the reef extending out, with sand in-between. On the south side of the northernmost finger, Rob found a crinoid, which he showed to me, because he knows I love crinoids. While we were looking at it, I saw a rockfish, which I didn't recognize at all, sort of tucked up against the reef. But completely out in the open. I pointed it out to Rob, and as he also had no clue what it was, he took some pictures. While he was doing that, I got an excited light signal from Kevin, who was at the very tip of the next reef finger. I went over to see what was up, and saw a field of crinoids -- yay! There were over a dozen full-sized ones and a couple of baby crinoids which were oh so cute. Eventually Rob came over to shoot some pictures of me with the crinoids. While I was supposed to be pretending to look at the crinoids, I was actually ogling some of the many (dozens) of Acanthadoris hudsoni all over the reef, including a really tiny one maybe a centimeter long. So cute! I was also noting that my hands were freakin' cold, I thought because my new wrist seals were too tight, inhibiting circulation (or, as those GUE types like to say, "perfusion"). Eventually Kevin and Rob moved along to the east a bit, back to what I would consider the south side of the main reef (as opposed to the "fingers" extending from it). I was still playing with the slugs and crinoids when I heard a squeal and looked over at them, just in time to see them both start to signal me at once. I scootered over to them, and then were pointing into a crack, which contained the largest lingcod I've ever seen. He was scary-big, and I have no idea why he felt the need to hide in a crack, considering his scary-bigness. Right next to him, half in the crack and half out of it, was a giant vermilion. They must have both been snacking on the same nuclear waste to end up so big.

After marveling at the giants for a bit longer, we headed to the east, ending up in a canyon between a ridge to the north and a ridge to the south. So we were on the south side of the ridge we had started on. Along the canyon, we saw several vase sponges and just generally a lot of fish. Although we did see quite a few vase sponges, they weren't the impressive towering ones that you often see in the OOP area. In fact, I was a bit surprised that this site didn't have "better" vase sponges. We stopped around 180' and switched onto our 190' bottles. We looked around briefly at that spot, then continued to the east. As we neared the high spot on the east side, we saw two bright dots in the distance, coming toward us, and eventually Matt and Jim appeared. They had been looking for any other high spots to the east, but hadn't found anything. Both of our teams ended up finishing our dives on that 160' high spot where we had started the dive. This spot had more of the stuff you typically see shallower, with a heavy covering of Corynactis. Rob thumbed the dive on time, and I started barking out deco orders. When we got to 90', I told them, by the way, that I was deco captain. Teehee. When we got to 70', we discussed the deco plan. The deep portion of the dive had been significantly shallower than we had planned, so we adjusted our deco slightly.

The viz was pretty amazing on deco. There were a good number of egg yolk jellies in the water column, and from 20 or 30 feet, you could look out in the distance and make out jellies that were obviously quite far away. The seascape was dotted with them. One other neat siting on deco was a pretty nice looking salp chain. It wasn't huge, but was pretty big. I regretted being too lazy to bring my hero cam to play with on deco. At 20 feet, the viz got a little wonky -- we could be in a patch of great viz and see a patch of murkiness drifting toward us (or, more likely, we were drifting toward it). But those murky patches sure were toasty warm!

Aside from the jelly-peeping, the deco was pretty uneventful. When we surfaced, the wind had definitely picked up a bit, but it was not too bad. The pickup was pretty easy, in fact it was quite fast. I ditched my two bottles, my scooter, and then headed up the ladder. I felt like I had an unusual amount of difficulty climbing the ladder. Usually, it is getting from the top rung of the ladder to the swimstep that is tough; there's always a two-second moment where I'm not sure I'm going to make it, and think I'm going to fall (but haven't... yet). But today it was pulling myself up the first few rungs of the ladder with my arms. Luckily I had pre-warned Michael to give me a hand, since I was climbing with my O2 bottle still on. After I plopped down on the bench and got out of my rig, Kevin and Rob eventually appeared back on the boat, and we reviewed the cool finds of the dive, while retrieving the other team. About five minutes after I got back on the boat, before I'd even stood up, I suddenly felt a stabbing pain in my left elbow, and an intense desire to get my arm out of my way too tight wrist seal :) I have (non-decompression-related) pain in my left shoulder and wrist with some regularity, but never my elbow, and never like this. It felt like an ice pick being jammed into my elbow. I also had a less distinct pain in my wrist. Rob helped me out of my suit and to retrieve my leftover O2 bottle, which I breathed for the entire ride back to the dock. After maybe 15 minutes, it felt maybe 50% better, and within the last 5 minutes of the boat ride back to the dock, it went from still hurting a bit to not really hurting at all. So, no permanent damage, except maybe to my skin -- I didn't get around to putting sunblock on during the ride home, and you know, wrinkles are forever. I cannot identify any reason that this dive would have caused my first-ever DCS hit, except for my tight wrist seal. I didn't consider the profile of the dive to be particularly aggressive, considering the dive was shallower than usual and we barely modified the deco. The only other slight difference was that I was extremely speedy in getting out of the water; so I may have done less "surface deco" than usual. But there is usually a lot of variation in this regard, so I don't see this as being a very significant factor. So I blame the wrist seals. Or maybe it was the French toast.

In addition to not attending to my skin care (or bladder) needs while slurping Oxygen on the ride home, I didn't manage to eat much, so I was starving when we got back to the dock. We headed to La Tortuga for lunch.

After circulating the picture of the mystery fish to the "fish guys", we found that the mystery fish is a juvenile cowcod. Neat! So I named the site "Little Cow Canyon" after the fishy. And after my little cow cat.

Drysuit Shakeout Dive

Rob was out of town this weekend, and I was not very on top of making plans to dive. I made some feeble attempts to find something to do, and by Thursday I had given up on diving. Or given up on trying to make plans anyway. On Friday afternoon, Matt asked me if I had any plans, because he was suddenly without a buddy for his Lobos tickets. Due to some sort of scheduing snafu, Leah couldn't dive on Saturday. I had also received a call on Friday from Any Water Sports, about my new drysuit having arrived. So after work, I headed down to AWS (with like a dozen tanks in the poor RAV4, which Rob had left for me to take to AWS after our dive the previous weekend) to try the suit on. I was happy to find that it actually fit pretty well. It didn't fit exactly like my current suit, which I was a bit miffed about (since I consider that suit to "fit perfectly"), but it did fit well. It was definitely worthy of sea trials. We got a late start on Saturday and rolled into Lobos at about 10:45 :) As we pulled in, the conversation turned to where to go. Eventually we decided to head down the sand channel, and if the viz was good, we'd head toward Granite Point, and otherwise, we'd head left, to the Sisters or Beto's, or maybe the shallows over there. Since we had no clue where or what depth we would end up, we took O2 bottles along for the ride.

The water was super calm and the tide was nice and high. I donned my new drysuit and had a little photo shoot before I got in the water, since both Ted and Rob had asked me to take a pic. Unfortunately the picture makes the suit look blue, but I swear it looks purple in real life! We loaded our float with scoots and bottles (the tide was conveniently high enough that we could load it up on the ramp and then I swam it out). Then we got geared up and after some reviewing the plan and doing gear checks, we headed into the water. I got roped into leading the dive, grumble. After dealing with a bubbly right post (which confirmed for me that I could actually do a flow check on the surface in my new suit), we scooted out on the surface until we were a bit past the worm patch. We dropped in 30-ish feet. I did another flow check once we hit the bottom and found that I could indeed reach my valves in the new suit. The viz was looking pretty good on the sand channel. We headed out on the right side of the sand channel, and by the end of middle reef, I had decided we'd go to Granite Point. As we were approaching transect 1 by the end of middle reef, I stopped at the crack just before the transect and peered through it. Ted had recently asked me if I knew if the crack went the whole way through the reef. Amazingly, though I have peered into the crack on numerous occasions to look for slugs or fish, I've never bothered to look through it. And it does indeed go through -- I could see light on the other side.

After that little stop off, we headed straight to granite point wall. The viz out there was good but not great. There were tons of egg yolk jellies, and unlike the dead or dying ones I saw last weekend at Lobos, many of them were in very good shape. We poked around behind the wall first. I found a couple interesting slugs, including one that was super tiny which I think was a Dendronotus albus but it was TINY, like the size of a big Eubranchus. After puttering around there for a bit, we headed north and scootered for a bit, stopping to look at the egg yolk jellies here and there, until we got to the little cove with hydrocoral. We looked around there for a bit. The barnacles are out of control there. I frequently scour the wall on the south of the cove, and all of those pretty patches of sponges are totally covered with barnacles. From there, we continued northeast up the chute that starts in the back of that cove. We basically continued east-northeast until we got pretty shallow, up to around 20 feet at the reef tops. It was alternating between periods of uber calmness and massive surge. But it was fun to just hang up there right under the kelp canopy. Eventually we headed a little west and found a decent-sized school of blue rockfish hanging in the kelp forest. I harassed them with my hero cam, which they tolerated surprisingly well.

From there, I decided to head back to the wall-sand interface, and work our way back. We headed west from where we were, until we hit a drop off and we headed down to the sand, and worked our way south. I found a couple of Hopkins roses right next to each other on a little rock under an overhang. They were cute, though not in the best spot for looking at. On our way south, we passed some rocks that were covered in Onchodoris bilamellata eggs. I had seen a bunch of their eggs last week too, but never got a chance to look for slugs. I was hoping I would find some today. I got the impression that Matt didn't know what kind of slug the eggs belonged to, so I was hoping to find one to show to him. Eventually we ended up back at the main wall and were looking around there, right at the northern tip. In between three boulders, I found a little crack with a rock in the bottom, and saw a single Onchodoris bilamellata sitting on that rock. I excitedly signaled to Matt and he came over to look. It took him a moment to figure out what he was looking at, and while he was staring into the crack, I noticed that one of the rocks next to it was completely carpeted in the slugs. It was so covered in them that they just blended in like they were the surface of the rock. Another nearby rock had a bunch of them too, this time fewer, so they were easier to see one by one. We found another rock that was completely carpeted to. There must have been a thousand slugs in total on these rocks. Really cool but also sort of creepy!

After appreciating the slugs for a while, we continued along the wall and finally headed back toward middle reef. Once we got to middle reef, we headed to the sand channel and were scootering back, when I spied a little thing in the water column. I stopped to look, and it was a super cute tiny little fish. I signaled for Matt to come over and after a moment of doubt on his face, he looked at the fish. I originally thought it was another one of those adorable kelp poacher things, but now I don't think so. First of all, it was way darker -- dark brown to black. And it had a much shapelier tail. I am going to have to do a bit of research on it. It had a really familiar look to me but I can't quite put my finger on what it reminded me of. In any case, it was super cute! We continued in past the worm patch and eventually decided to switch to our O2 bottles, because hey, why not? Shortly after that, we found another interesting floater -- some cool looking shrimp. It had an opaque brown (or maybe grey) and white striped shell. We continued in and I veered to the right until we got to the point where I knew we were right along the edge of the cove. But I lost confidence in my ability to find the float line underwater and eventually thumbed it, about 40 feet from the ball :)

I would say it was quite a successful dive with the new drysuit. The suit is a bit bigger than my other suit in the thighs and torso, but still within the reasonable range. And I love those small Halcyon pockets!

We packed up and headed to RG for milkshakes to go, then headed back to San Jose for dinner with Leah.

Anniversary Dive

It was our anniversary weekend, so we decided to do a dive for two at Lobos. Since we haven't successfully dived Twin Peaks in a while, we decided to go there. Rob and Matt spied an Okenia felis out there recently, so I was hoping for another siting. But strangely, Rob was shooting wide angle (which may have had more to do with what was already setup than anything...). We got to Lobos pretty late, at my insistence, since we went on a date the night before. On the way down to Monterey, we passed Ted, which we were a bit shocked by, since we were running so late. I think we got to Lobos just before 9:30. It was a pretty good day for loading a bazillion bottles onto the float (I secretly knew that the tide would be more favorable a bit later, so that was part of my master plan to show up late). I offered to swim, since swimming bottles totally beats carrying them. I even offered to swim out Ted and Brian's bottles to their float, since they didn't have much and I was already in the water; and it's always good to be owed a favor :)

Rob and I got into the water pretty quickly, got our gear from the float, and headed out on the surface. We dropped into the sand channel to find pretty so-so viz. We started down the sand channel, and I quickly heard any annoying bubbly noise coming from my left post. We stopped briefly so that Rob could fix it. The exact same thing happened the last time we dove Lobos, but this time I didn't forget to do a flow check after Rob was done tinkering with my valves :) We got started once again and found that the viz cleared up a bit north of Hole in the Wall, Lone Metridium, etc. We headed to the left at Hole in the Wall, and sort of straddled the line between worse and better viz. Along the way, I saw one of the big boulders in the sand was covered with the eggs of Onchidoris bilamellata. I figured I could look for slugs on deco :) The viz still was only okay to the north though. Eventually we headed that way, encountering a pretty big school of blue rockfish above us about halfway to the First Sister. They were just hanging there, above us, at about 60 feet. The so-so viz continued out to the start of the Road, and then a little bit along there, it seemed like the viz actually got worse. Maybe it was just because it was darker, so it seemed that way. Anyway, it definitely wasn't the right day for Rob to be packing wide angle :P Oh well.

Despite the bad viz, we did eventually make it all the way out to the Peaks. Once we got to the big one, we slowed down, and would park in an area for a bit, then slowly move along. There was a noticeable current out there, to the point where it was difficult to stay in one place to focus on little stuff :) But we still made a couple of interesting finds. The best find was definitely an Okenia felis, which Rob found. Good work! It was actually a really nice looking specimen, nice and symmetrical looking -- it's a shame Rob couldn't get a picture. This was definitely the deepest I have seen one. All of the others have been on the Road in 120 to 130-ish feet. After ogling that for a while, we eventually moved on, and I found an Aldisa albomarginata. I haven't seen one of those in ages! That slug is close to my heart, since I was looking for it when I found the first Okenia felis :P Other than these two slugs, we saw some Dotos and I found a cute muppet fish (an Irish lord I think). Shortly after we both switched off of our stages, I suggested we head in, so we could look around on the Road on the way in. So we did that. We didn't find anything terribly interesting on the Road, but did see some Dironas.

Eventually we headed in. Rob wanted to shoot straight from the Road to Beto's, so we went that way. I was a little nervous partway across that we were going to miss it to the north, so I started subtly nudging Rob to the right :) We hit Beto's and headed in along that, with just a brief stop to look for the wolf eel (Bert), but he was not in, or maybe just not taking visitors. Since we came back via Beto's, I didn't get a chance to look for those slugs on deco. On the way back just south of Sea Mount I saw some more rocks with lots of eggs on them, but they were around 75 or 80 feet, so I didn't get a chance to look at them either. Boohoo. Just around where we stopped to go onto our 50% bottles, Brian and Ted scooted past us. Ted didn't notice us, so we tried to sneak up on him and buzz past him :) After our 60 foot stop, we headed over to Middle Reef for the rest of deco. Eventually Rob decided to take some pictures of Ted and Brian, though they didn't seem that interested :) Once we got to 30 feet, we left Middle Reef and just headed in. Rob's scooter died as we were arriving for our 20 foot stop. Or I guess it was just making that noise where it is about to die. We just hung out for a bit at 20 feet, and then decided to mosey on in. We passed by a couple of red clouds which were swarms of some sort of little shrimp -- it was pretty eerie to see this moving cloud of red. Kind of cool but also pretty gross. I was trying to avoid the cloud, but Rob swam right through one. Eek! Eventually we made it back to our float and we surfaced.

After we got ourselves and our gear out of the water, we cleaned up and went to RG with Ted and Brian.

Since the viz was so crappy, Rob didn't even bother to take his camera out. So no pictures today!