Memorial Day Weekend

I've officially decided that I should no longer feel constrained to posting blog posts in date order, since that just means that I am always more and more behind on my posts.  And, ya know, it's my blog, so I can do what I want :)  So, here's a pretty recent post, even though I have a bunch more posts to catch up on from the past 3 months.


Memorial Day weekend was pretty action-packed, even though very little of that action involved diving.  I drove down on Thursday night, and brought the kitties along.  They were not too amused.  I don't know if it was the night driving, or just the fact that getting Pepper into her carrier was quite a bit more traumatic than usual, but they squawked their heads off until at least Morgan Hill, before finally falling asleep and being mostly quiet for the rest of the ride.  We didn't do a ton on Friday -- Rob was working and I spent a good part of the afternoon putting together a super complicated-to-assemble sewing table that I had just picked up from Walmart.  I'm honestly not sure if I would have bought the thing if I knew it was *that* complicated to put together :)  Friday night, we went to one of the beaches along Ocean View Blvd so that Rob could take some pictures of sunset.  Rob has just started playing around with HDR pics at sunset, and probably wouldn't consider this one production quality, but I think it's quite nice.

On Saturday, we were in the Escapade.  The forecast was pretty iffy, and so were the conditions!  We managed to make it down to the Lobos area, with E3/Deep E3 as the target.  Not too far from Lobos, I was adjusting my neck seal (I was already completely in my suit at this point), and I felt a crack/slit at the edge of it.  A pretty big-feeling one.  It felt like it might split at any moment.  I asked Kevin to take a look and tell me if he thought it was diveable.  He was pretty iffy on it, so he took a picture of it with his phone, so that I could take a look.  Maybe even more disconcerting than the split itself was that there were lots more little cracks below and all around it.  Rob looked at it, and said he thought he could duct tape it.  John and Clinton both registered skepticism about diving that on a tech dive.  In the end, Rob did duct tape it, but I still decided it was too iffy for a tech dive.  Live to dive another day.  So I warned Clinton that I would definitely be expecting a second (recreational) dive with him, and helped everyone else get geared up and into the water.  I did a bunch of bottle clipping, and man, that's kind of hard work on a pitching boat.  The crew on the Escapade always make it look easy though :)

While the boys were in the water, I got to pass the time practicing holding station in the big boat.  Actually there was only a very short period of time where I was at the wheel, and I found it quite terrifying.  I kept us heading into the wind (there were quite a lot of whitecaps by this point) for a while, but eventually I had to turn if I was going to circle back around to the downline, and that was terrifying.  But kind of fun.  Also while they were down, we saw a breaching whale out in the distance.  He was breaching over and over and over again; it was a bummer we couldn't go check it out.  Before you know it, bags were up and we meandered along with them, wringing our hands about whether one of the teams was going to drift too close to the rocks for a pickup in this wind.  In the end, they just made it beyond where it would have been dicey to do a pickup.  The pickups were only the usual amount of dicey-ness for this amount of wind.  The conditions actually deteriorated quite a bit in the last 10 to 15 minutes that divers were in the water, so it was pretty snotty by the time everyone was back on board.  So we got the heck out of there, and headed back to the bay for a second dive.

Even in the bay, it was pretty snotty at some of the further out sites, like Ballbuster.  So I decided to go wimpy and suggested Eric's Pinnacle.  Clinton agreed.  No one else was excited enough to do a second dive.  I guess the first dive wasn't that awesome; it was dark/green, and neither Rob nor Clinton thought it was nice enough to even get their cameras out to take pictures.  When we anchored at Eric's, you could see pretty far down the line, so we thought we were in for nice conditions.  It turns out that the water was very clear in the top 15 to 20 feet, but below that, it was pretty murky.  The viz was probably slightly better than average for Eric's, but definitely not what we had in mind from what we saw on the boat.  Oh well.  Clinton managed to at least get a few nice pictures of me, as Ted later said to me, "at Eric's... in a rebreather".  Yea, that's pretty lame.  Much of the dive was in the 20 to 30 foot range, so I felt like I was trying to get my buoyancy and loop volume right for like the entire dive.  Clinton kept pointing the camera at me while I was on the way up shallower or down deeper, when my buoyancy was never right!  So I think a lot of his shots had bubbles coming out of my nose.  That's what he gets for not giving me any warning before he starts clicking :P

I was a bit disappointed after the dive, when I took my drysuit off, that the neck seal didn't explode dramatically.  In fact, it didn't split at all; I guess the duct tape worked :)  We headed to lunch at the pub at K-dock, and sat outside, where everyone was either too cold or too hot.  Later in thte afternoon, Rob and I went for a short hike at Lobos.  Rob was hoping to take some pictures of baby seals or maybe otters, but due to technical difficulties (which I won't expound upon, to protect Rob's street cred), no pictures were taken.  We took the patch around whaler's cove over to coal chute, then up to the thumb, and a little further to the cove by Monastery.  It was a nice short "hike".  Since the traffic back through Carmel was terrible, we decided to take a little drive down the coast, hoping traffic would clear before we came back.  We made it down to Bixby Creek Bridge, parked there and walked around a little (Rob was scoping out spots to take pictures of the bridge from), and then headed back.  Traffic was way better by the time that we got back.

On Sunday, we were hoping to take the ducky out for some whale action, but the sea conditions were not favorable.  But Rob was really itching to get some pictures with his new lens.  We met Jim for lunch (at La Tortuga), and Jim offered to show us some of his spots where he takes pictures of birds.  So we went on a little tour of birding spots in the Moss Landing through Aptos area.  We finished up at an osprey nest, where we hung out for a while.  It was pretty overcast when we first got there.  We did manage to see an osprey return to the nest with a fish in his claws (Rob got a shot of this, but since the background was an overcast sky, he won't publish it :( ), and then we watched him eat the fish (very slowly).  Later on, the sun finally came out and Rob got some blue sky pictures of one of the ospreys stretching his wings.  Yay!

On Monday, the conditions were ducky-able.  We met Jim, Bev, and Clinton in Moss Landing, and headed out from there.  We saw humpbacks here and there closer to shore, but the real action was pretty far out, maybe 10 miles from shore.  There was a one mile or so area where there must have been 30 whales.  Once we got out there, Rob, Clinton, and Jim all got their cameras out, so I was stuck with the task of driving.  We pretty much just had to look out and pick which group of spouts we wanted to go look at.  At some point, I was debating about which group of spouts to go to next, when all of a sudden I heard a loud almost growling sound, and a whale came up within 10 feet of the boat.  The "growling" was the up-close sound of a whale exhaling.  A total of 5 or 6 whales all came up without maybe 15 feet of the boat, all around us.  It was really cool, but a bit scary too, since they kind of came out of nowhere.  Luckily none of them decided to breach right next to the boat.

We eventually found a young whale that was breaching over and over and over again.  We spent quite a bit of time watching him.  His mom was swimming along next to him, just doing the normal whale thing, while he was just breaching over and over again.  It was a lot of fun (and a lot of work, keeping us on the right side of the whale for the right light for the ornery photographers on the boat).  In addition to this guy, we had an encounter with a flamboyant tail-slapper, and some very friendly/curious albatrosses.  One of them seemed to really really want his picture taken.  After several hours of whale fun, we came back in and had dinner at the Sea Harvest right there by the harbor.

Then, we had the complicated task of getting ourselves (and our cats) home on a holiday weekend.  We headed back to PG to get the cats, but the traffic report was so terrible that we stayed there until pretty late, to let the traffic clear.  In the end it took about 2 hours to get home, which isn't terrible (pretty standard for 101 on a Sunday night, though usually earlier in the evening).  Rob got home much faster than me, because he took 17.  But I really didn't want to take the cats over 17, since I was afraid it would make them carsick.  But we eventually all made it home, without much squawking from the kitties.

The K1 Crack, Found Again

Nearly five years ago, we did a particularly awesome dive at K2, where we found this really cool vertical crack "somewhere north" of K2.   It was one of the coolest spots, topography-wise, that I've dived locally.  It was insanely narrow, so covered with gorgonians on both sides, and in one spot, there was a fallen boulder that was suspended between the two walls.  I loved the spot, Rob got this super cool picture of me between the walls, that was still not nearly as cool as it looked in real life :P  We looked for it on a couple of subsequent dives, and never did find it again.  Then, a couple months ago, when I was sick (with my never-ending cold/sinus infection), Rob went on a dive without me (with Clinton and John I think), and found the crack from K1.  I was pretty bitter that they went back to the crack without me AND the viz was insanely good.  So, we were back at Mt Chamberlin, trying to decide where to dive, and Rob said that he thought he could now find the crack from K1.  Actually he said he was sure he could find it.  So the pressure was on :P

We got into clear, cold blue water, with excellent viz all the way to the bottom.  We came down the side of K1 pinnacle, I believe on the east side, down to the sand, and from there it seemed like we could see forever.  We started to come around the pinnacle, counterclockwise, and stopped briefly to check out a wolf eel.  We continued on our path around the pinnacle, and before long, we were on a less dramatically sloping structure, to our left, with sand as far as the eye could see (and it could see far) to our right.  It was kind of boring.  It was noticeably less encrusted, and while the viz was insanely good, there just wasn't a lot to see.  I was starting to wonder about Rob's certainty that he could find the crack.  Just when I was about to ask him where the heck we were, we encountered a nice big salp chain out over the sand, so we stopped to take some pictures.

Once we got going from there, we ended up at the crack pretty quickly.  Just before we got to the crack, actually basically right at the entrance to the crack, we found a dead GPO on the bottom :(  It was still completely in tact, but completely white.  Not a very nice find, but at least we had managed to find the crack.  We headed in there, from the end where that big boulder was suspended between the walls.  Rob likes to photograph the boulder, even though the walls further in a zillion times more photogenic.  They are just so insanely encrusted, even prettier than I remember them.  I was hanging out in there where the crack seemed to be at its narrowest, while Rob took some pictures.  I must say, it was kind of nice not going up and down every time I inhaled and exhaled.  I could have hung out there all day while Rob took pictures.  The pictures turned out nicely, but I still think they can't possible do the spot justice!  Rob and I were discussing this, and it might be fun to play around with some slave strobes in there sometime, to light up the wall behind me as well.

After we finished up there, we headed out of the crack, where there was a nice colorful spot on the pinnacle with quite a few yellowtail rockfish, and more super-lush gorgonians.  We hung out there for the rest of the dive, getting more pictures and enjoying the scenery.  I wasn't exactly sure if we were back on K1 when we finished the dive, but I guess we were.  I could hear the other team's scooters nearby.  We popped our bag, and had what I would describe as a rather interesting deco. As soon as the bag went up, and we came off of the pinnacle, we went zooming across the pinnacle.  There hadn't been much current on the bottom, but we were flying once we were in mid-water.  And it wasn't just pushing us horizontally through the water.  When we were at around 80 feet, on our way to 70 feet, we can shooting across another structure.  We worked our way to 70 feet, started timing the stop, and then after we drifted across the structure, and were back in deeper water, it was like we were dropped almost 10 feet.  We were at 70 feet and then we were in the high-70s.  We returned to 70 feet, but then for the next couple of stops, we had periodic "current" going up and down, presumably as we were pushed over deeper structures.  It was crazy.  For some of the moves between stops, I felt like I had to swim up just to get up to the nice stop.  Finally at around 40 feet, everything seemed to settle down, and the rest of the deco was uneventful.

I mentioned the wonky currents during deco to Gary and John, who didn't seem to have been bothered by it.  I found this pretty strange.  Then later, Rob told me that he had mentioned it to Clinton, who had no idea what he was talking about.  Then Jim, who had been driving the boat, said that even though we popped our bags really close to each other, after our bag went up we went zooming off in one direction, while the other team's bag just sort of bobbed along slowly.  I guess we were in two different currents for our drifts.  Weird!

Anyhoo, it was great to finally find the crack again, and I'm glad at least one of us knows how to find it again.  I can't believe it's been almost 5 years since we were last there.  That makes me feel old :P

Kitties with a Ball of String at Mt Chamberlin

We did a very fun dive at Mt Chamberlin, which unfortunately doesn't have any pictures or video to go with it :(  But it was sort of the nature of the dive that no pictures managed to be taken.  Two weeks earlier, while I was visiting my parents, Rob went diving with Jim and Joakim, to the Mount Chamberlin area, and I guess the downline was lost somehow.  It came detached (or maybe was never attached?) to the float on the surface.  I'm not sure when/how this happened, maybe when the line was being retrieved, but the bottom line is, they lost the ball and line, and did not manage to recover them on that dive.

So we happened to make it back down to there today, and we were hoping to recover the ball and line.  We dropped the downline at the South Wall, but we planned to head to the Annex.  I was diving with Rob, Kevin, and the one they call McNeill.  The viz was good (very good even), so we made the jump over to the annex, and were following the north side wall to the west (like we always do), and as we came around the corner at the west end, we could see a big thick line, clearly the line attached to the lost ball.  Rob and Kevin got to work with dragging the line back as they followed it back around the pinnacle to the ball.  Clown music was playing in my head as I watched.  I initially hung back, because usually when Rob and Kevin decide to do something like this, it's best to just stay back.  I did eventually have to get involved to ensure that no elephant ear sponges were harmed in the recovery of this ball.  We followed the line back around to the ball, and it was up a bit shallower, sitting in maybe 170'. 

As it turned out, it was sitting right on the flat area just in front of the swim-through that we've been having fun with on the annex lately.  Anyway, Rob and Kevin tried to lay the line out sort of flat-like, so that it wouldn't catch on anything, then attached a bag to the end and sent it up.  The idea was that the bag would go to the surface, and the ball would stay where it was.  It didn't go exactly as planned... the ball kind of rolled a bit and then got pulled down off the pinnacle to the sand channel between the annex and the main structure.  And off it went (the ball was recovered by the boat crew, but this was the last that we saw of it).  Once that was finished, we were conveniently located right at our favorite swim-through, so we headed through that.  Every time that I've gone through there, I've started on the south side (the opposite side that we were on today), and came up through the swim-through, where you land on a nice gorgonian-encrusted flat-ish area (where we found the ball).  Today we went through in the reverse direction, which is a million times cooler, because you come out of the swim-through on the side of the wall, with 50+ feet of blue water below you, so you are staring into the abyss as you come out of the swim-through.  Definitely more fun that way!  From there, we headed down the wall, and around the back side, to the east.  Just as we started to come up the structure to cut through a crack, we found a wolf eel.  After checking that out, we continued up to the top of the structure.  Jon was on a stage bottle, so we paused there so he could switch off of it.  While he was doing that, I found another wolf eel!  I was pretty excited, and wanted to show someone, but Kevin was being a good buddy, watching Jon, and well, Jon was switching bottles.  So I finally got Rob to come over and enjoy the wolfy peeping with me.

From there, we headed north over the channel, and up the ridge to K2.  We made it back to K2, did a GPO sweep (negative), and then headed up the pinnacle.  We had an uneventful (though somewhat cold) deco.  The cold water is definitely back!

Mount Chamberlin South Wall

Photo by Robert Lee

I managed to miss some really awesome dives in the past few weeks, due to a cold which turned into a sinus infection.  From the looks of the pictures that Rob and Clinton posted, the viz was amazing.  Sigh.  But, I was finally back, and we made it to Yankee Point, despite a weather forecast that made that look quite unlikely.  I guess when you add up all the times the forecast looks good and the conditions aren't, it's about time that we get the reverse situation.

Photo by Robert Lee

So, having made it down to Yankee Point, we of course went to the current favorite area there, Mount Chamberlin.  We went to the south wall, and ended up playing around at the southwest corner.  I don't think that was really the plan going into the dive, but that's where we ended up :)  The awesome viz with bright blue water has apparently moved along, sigh.  The viz was still okay, but it was dark.  Luckily we saw a few cool things to make up for that.  First, we (and when I say "we", I mean Kevin) found the purple sea fan over near the southwest corner.  Maybe I shouldn't say "the" purple sea fan, but "a" purple sea fan.  The depth and general area of it seemed right for it being the same one that we've seen there before.  Though it did seem a bit closer to the wall than I remember it.

Photo by Robert Lee

The other really cool find was what looked like a blood red elephant ear sponge.  We were heading up the channel from the south wall to K2, and we went under the arch/swim-through thing (apparently my going under there surprised Kevin, since I'm usually so un-fun).  Right as I popped out of the swim-through, I saw this weird looking elephant ear sponge, and practically did a double take.  I forced Rob to come back and take a look; then I forced him to take some pictures.  It's so pretty!  Upon closer examination, it looks like it is something red that is growing on the sponge.  I don't really know what it is, but it looks pretty.  Which probably means its some sort of terrible elephant-ear disease :P

From there, we continued on up the channel to K2.  It seemed like the gorgonians were extra lush and bushy looking today.

Photo by Clinton Bauder

Clinton was on the boat too, and he got a picture which I have to include, because I think it's totally adorable.  As regular readers may know, I have an unnatural love of crinoids.  Well, Clinton found a crinoid unusually shallow.  It was hitching a ride on the back of a crab.  So cute!

Kawika's Garden

Photo by Clinton Bauder

I was just recovering from a cold (which managed to cause me to miss two awesome days of diving) today, so I was a bit worried that I wouldn't be able to dive.  In fact, I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to clear my ears, but I wanted to at least try to go for a dive.  We only managed to make it to Kawika's Garden, due to bad weather.  But it was super flat there.  I asked John and Clinton to get in a couple minutes after us, so if I couldn't make it down the line, Rob would bring me back up to the surface and then the three of them could go for a dive.  So, we did that, and of course it turned out that I had no trouble clearing my ears at all, and actually got to do a dive.  Well it was just a dive in the bay, but since it seems like I've been missing a lot of dives lately, I was happy just to go diving :)  No pictures from Rob, so I've snarfed a picture from Clinton to keep things pretty.

Three Nixies

Today we went to Three Nixies.  It seems like there was a period of time where we went here a lot, but not so much anymore.  Or maybe I just remember it differently.  Seems like Mount Chamberlin was, for a long time, the old standby area to go to if we could make it to Yankee Point.  Then we started going to Dos Gatos/Three Nixies a lot more, and now the pendulum has swung back the other way.  Anyhoo, we were there today.

The water was pretty green on the way down, but around 160 feet or so, the water got very clear and very cold.  But of course it was a bit dark down there, under the 160' layer of greenness.  We still had a great dive, though.  We headed down to the sand and after wandering around near the bottom of one of the pinnacles, we headed over the sand to another pinnacle, and along the way, we found a couple of orange sea pens.  I don't know why, but I just love those things... they look so fluffy!  One of them was out in the sand by itself, and we spent quite a bit of time getting pictures of it.  Posing right on the bottom, with a sandy bottom, is always fun.  Not.  To make matters more fun, there was some current (which is why it looks like the sea pen is taking a bow in the picture).  When we finally continued on, we ended up finding another one at the base of a wall, which made for slightly easier posing, but I think a much less cool picture.

It's kind of hard to believe, but by the time we were done with the sea pens, it was past time to get shallower.  Yea, we were playing with those sea pens for quite a while :)  We came back to the pinnacle where the downline was, which comes up to about 100 feet, and we swam around on that for a while.  It was both warmer and greener here.  We eventually ended up at a little side pinnaclet, or really more of a small peak on the main pinnacle, and I was sent UP for some silhouette shots.  I was pretty skeptical that this would work out, since it was so green, but I actually really like the way this picture turned out!  Except that I look like I have three legs.

There was an option to do a second dive at Eric's Pinnacle, which we passed on.

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).