Sea Lions over Ed Coopers Wall

Kevin and I were on a BAUE tech boat on Saturday.  We were sans Rob, since he was teaching a class that day.  There was a moderate-sized swell in the forecast, but with a long period, so we weren't too worried about that from a boating perspective, and there wasn't much wind (and I believe it was out of the south, or some non-standard direction).  We ended up at Ed Coopers' wall, which for some reason, Kevin has been antsy to dive recently.  We tried to dive it recently, but it didn't work out, so he asked for it again, and who can complain about that?  The ride down was quite calm, though when we got there, we found that at the point, there were big breakers from the long swell.  So definitely not a day to drift into the rocks :)

We got geared up and into the water, and found excellent color and visibility on the top.  But things got a bit murky once we got down to the bottom, on the reef.  It was quite churned up from the swell, and it was damn surgy for that depth!  We started to scooter out along the wall, toward deeper water, and my scooter was moving very slowly.  So slowly that it was basically unusable.  So I told Kevin, and we just kicked instead.  This was pretty easy, since we were kicking with the current :P  The topography of that wall is always quite impressive, but it had quite a few barnacles.  It wasn't completely devastated by them or anything, there were certainly still very colorful patches, but in some areas, there were a lot of barnacles.  We eventually made it out to a sort of plateau at around 200 feet, which was totally covered with brittle stars.  Weird.

When it came time to go shallower, we headed back in the direction that we'd come.  However, since we'd been swimming along the wall at 200', we didn't have anything to follow back at 150'... the wall only came up to like 170' where we were.  Doh.  So we decided to scooter, and I found that my scooter wasn't up to the task (we were now going up-current), and so Kevin towed me.  He towed me for a bit in a, umm, non-standard towing configuration, just long enough to get to a small spot in the 150' area.  But I wanted to find a spot that comes up shallower, so we could at least do our deep stops on the reef.  The spot we were on was just sort of a lone peak, without any wall to follow shallower.  So then we went into a proper towing configuration, and off we went, looking for the shallower part of the main wall.  We were scootering for quite a while, and at some point, I realized that all I could see below us was blue water.  We eventually found another peak that came up to about 160' or 170', but this still wasn't really a shallow enough spot.  After a bit more searching around, we ended up giving up and thumbing the dive, in blue water, about 5 minutes early.

So I guess overall the bottom portion of the dive was pretty meh, what with the bad viz, scooter failure, getting lost, and barnacle invasion.  But the deco portion was actually quite fun!  Once we cleared 100', the viz was stellar.  The water was bright blue, and we could see so far in all directions.  It was also, strangely, sort of warm; not what I'd expect for such clear blue water.  After we got onto our 70' bottles,
we began the deco negotiations.  Since we had aborted the dive early, I thought we could trim our deco a bit.  I had an idea of what I wanted to do, having spent a bit of time playing with different lengths of the shallow segment in deco planner, but I wasn't sure Kevin would go for it.  Then he whipped out his wetnotes, which contained this super awesome multi-level dive table (for this depth range) that Rob and I made a few years ago.  Rob and Kevin have these in their wetnotes, but for some reason I don't!  Anyway, that made it easy to confirm what I wanted to do, and we quickly settled on a new deco profile.  Not long after that, we were visited by some curious sea lions.  There were quite a few of them, and they spent a good bit of time zooming around us.  They got a bit more shy around our 20' stop, which was unfortunate, since it was so bright there, it would have been a great video opportunity.  The very fun deco made up for the somewhat disappointing dive.

Winter Conditions at Yankee Point

We were back for more on Sunday, with a BAUE tech boat.  We spent the night in Monterey, which meant that I got to sleep in, which is the best way to dive I think :P  There was still a long period swell around, which made for a very nice, flat ride down to Yankee Point.  Considering how good the viz had been at Lobos the day before, I was pretty hopeful for another day of great conditions (and pretty bummed about my lack of video light).  We decided to go to the Three Nixies, which I haven't been to in a while, so that sounded good to me.

When we got in the water, we were not disappointed.  The water was bright and clear.  The downline was on the big pinnacle (I think it's the biggest) that comes up to maybe 100'.  We headed down to the bottom of that, and across the sand to one of the nearby pinnacles.  We were just meandering around at the bottom of one of pinnacles for a while, where I saw lots of lingcods, large and small, and some nice gorgonian gardens.  The visibility was excellent, you could easily see across the sand to at least two of the other pinnacles from where we were, and it was very bright for the depth.  Eventually we decided to move along, and not too long after that, I got an excited flash from Rob, who had happened upon the purple sea fan!  We've seen this instance of the purple sea fan once before (though Rob forgot that we had, so he was extra excited to find a "new" one :P).  When I saw the sea fan, I realized that I'd been a bit disoriented about where we were, compared to where I remembered the sea fan being before.  But I guess the excellent viz threw me off a bit.

We signaled the other team (above us), to show them the sea fan, and they were a bit less interested in coming down to take a look at it.  I guess it was a bit on the deeper side of the dive plan, but I take a +/- 20 feet approach to MOD when it comes to GUE standard gases :)  Maybe that's something I shouldn't admit on the internet, but the standard gases are pretty conservative to begin with...  Anyhoo, Rob got some nice pictures of me posing with Mr. Purple, and after that, it was time to head shallower.  We worked our way back over to the big pinnacle where we started, and hung out around the 140-150 range for a bit.  The gorgonians around there are super nice and lush, and there were many passes of being lined up for photos with the gorgonians :P  There were some barnacles, but not as bad as elsewhere.  I found a little red octopus on the wall, which struck me as odd, since it was so bright out.

Eventually we moved around the pinnacle, and found a huge school of juvenile rockfish.  Rob found this nice spot where the pinnacle jutted out a bit, with a nice elephant ear sponge, and all of the little rockfish in the background.  It had all of the makings of a nice spot for a picture, until we realized how much surge there was, just a bit shallower than we'd been for the past several minutes.  It was definitely coming and going, but at some point a really big set rolled through and I thought Rob was going to be flipped upside down by the surge!  As we moved up the pinnacle, it was really sort of more of the same, so instead of trying to eek out a few more minutes on the pinnacle during our deep stops, we just left the pinnacle and put up a bag.

By the time we left the pinnacle, I was really cold.  Actually, I was really cold for the entire second half of our bottom time.  So I thought that deco would be really uncomfortable, but it turned out that the water warmed up a bit (which was odd, because the viz didn't deteriorate that much), so deco was reasonably comfortable.  Around 40 feet, I was imagining what I would do to warm up once back on the boat.  There's always the Cup O' Noodles option (which Rob likes, and I eat to get warm, but don't particularly love).  And I was thinking... what Jim really needs on the boat is hot chocolate.  Then around 30 feet, I suddenly remembered that there IS hot chocolate on the boat.  Or at least I had it once a long time ago.  So I spent the rest of deco thinking about hot chocolate, and when I got back on the boat, I did manage to dig up a packet of hot chocolate.  Ahhhh.  This could be a game changer.

Underwater Parks Day at Point Lobos

On Saturday, we helped out at the Underwater Parks Day at Point Lobos.  This is the second year in a row that BAUE has participated, by putting together a marine life display in Whaler's Cove.  We do an early dive to collect some (hardy) specimens from the water, and then put them in tubs of water, so that the visitors can look at and touch them, and ask questions that we try to answer correctly :P  This is only the second time we've done this for the Underwater Parks Day, but we do a similar presentation for middle schoolers from Carmel once a year, so we've pretty much got the whole process down to a science at this point.  The water was super flat and it was a nice high tide, so a good day to be schlepping collection gear in and out of the water.  The water was also super clear in the middle of the cove, though it was a bit stirred up on the bottom further out and along the rocks on the side of the cove (where we did most of our collection), due to a long period swell that was just churning up the sand.  I was mostly videoing my buddies (Jason and Oleg), who were collecting.  But eventually I got bored with that and so I collected a couple of nudibranchs :)

We surfaced near the ramp, handed off most of our specimens at the ramp, and then went over to the little rock near the ramp, for some Hilton's hunting.  It was quite productive, and in a couple minutes, we had collected 3 of those.  Soon after that, I noticed a stream of very small bubbles coming out of my video light, which is never a good sign :(  I got it out of the water as quickly as I could, gave it a freshwater rinse, packed it in rice, etc.  In the end, it was still toast, boohoohoo, so it's now back at the manufacturer (so no videos for a while).  Anyhoo, I digress.  We brought our nudi samples back in, and setup the specimens at three different stations.  There was a pretty good flow of people, though it wasn't quite as good as last year.  I think last year was the first year that they did the event, so perhaps there was more interest.  For some strange reason, people seem to really like the keyhole limpets.  I guess they are big and weird looking, but not really my first choice for things to look at.  They liked the nudibranchs too, of course, since we had specimens of all different colors and shapes.  Someone even managed to bring back a Hopkins rose this year!  The one thing missing from the spread this year was a  sunflower star.  They are always a big hit with both the kids and adults, but they have sadly been decimated by the sea star wasting disease.  So we decided in advance that we would not collect any, even if we found some (which we did not).

After the presentations, we returned the critters to the water.  Then I went for a fun dive with Rob and Jon.  We wanted to go back to Beto's to look for the GPO that we found on Christmas Eve, and then we also planned to just do a bit of a scooter tour of that side of Lobos.  First we headed out to Beto's.  The viz was a bit churned up in the sand channel, but it was excellent once we were past about Hole in the Wall.  For some reason, my scooter seemed a bit slow today.  Jon has a fast scooter, so at first I chalked it up to that, but I was slow even compared to Rob (who was in the lead, while I was in the back).  We went to Beto's and found the GPO without too much difficulty.  I am pretty sure he (she?) is actually in the exact same crack that the wolf eel(s) used to live in.  He didn't come out to play or anything, but he was clearly visible.  Also, he seemed a bit bigger than when we last saw him.  I don't know how fast they grow, but he was a pretty small one when we first saw him.

After amusing ourself with the GPO and looking around at Beto's, which featured several MASSIVE lingcod, and a nice little school of blue rockfish hanging above the reef, we headed over to the Sisters.  Those barnacles have really done a number on the Sisters, again.  In particular, I noticed that on the first sister, the hydrocoral shrub that is right in the center is totally covered in barnacles.  Little bastards.  They did seem to be in the dying phase of barnacleness though.  We headed from there to the second sister, hung there for a bit, then over to the third, where there were some more blue rockfish.  We eventually meandered past there to a fourth little pinnacle (maybe a stepsister?) before deciding to head in shallower, toward Lone Metridium, etc.  We stopped at Lone Metridium, where Rob was shooting some pictures.  I put myself up above for some silhouette shots, and eventually he had me position WAY up above.

After a few minutes of that, we continued in.  There had been some discussion of going to the east side of middle reef, but for some reason, we were on the west side of the sand channel.  I questioned Rob about this, so he told me to lead, and I took us over to the top of middle reef (at which point, Rob suddenly and magically became captain again, and took us over to the east side).  I posed for  some more silhouette shots at the sort of north east corner of middle reef, and by the time that was done, I'd had enough with posing and holding my breath, etc.  So then we just headed in along the east side, which was very nice and clear.  It was much nicer viz than the sand channel side.  Now if only a whale would swim by... The viz in the cove was pretty murky on the scoot in, but we made it nearly the whole way in to the ramp anyway.  By the time we got out, the ramp had become a wee bit sloshy with that long period swell, though the tide was still high enough that getting out wasn't a problem.

Christmas Eve at Lobos

We had a boat cancellation the weekend before Christmas, but I was too lame to organize alternate dive plans.  Then when I saw pictures from the weekend, with awesome viz, and also saw the excellent forecast for the next few days, I decided we should go diving on Christmas Eve.  When we got there, the surface conditions were excellent, as forecast.  It was also a nice high tide, ahhh.  We decided to go to Twin Peaks.  When we were discussing the plan the day before, I asked how many bottles that required, and shockingly, Rob said it was up to me.  No pressure.  Then I thought about how annoying it is to have to turn the dive on gas, so I called for three bottles :)

We got all the gear setup, which was pretty easy with the high tide and barely moving water, and got into the water pretty quickly.  It wasn't very crowded at Lobos, which I found sort of surprising, but I guess most normal people were attending to family obligations.  The viz in the cove was really good as we scootered out, but when we dropped in the sand channel, we found that it was a bit churned up.  The viz wasn't terrible, but not at all what I was expecting based on the cove.  Once we got to Hole in the Wall, it was like someone had flipped a switch, and just like that, the viz got really good.  It only got better as we continued on.  We went out via Lone Metridium and the Sisters, and pretty much headed straight down the road all the way to Twin Peaks.

The viz was really good, with bright blue water.  We played around a bit with lighting pictures with my video light and Rob's strobes, which consumed a bit of time.  Aside from that, I was mostly looking for little critters.  But Rob actually made the best macro find of all, which was a nice plump Cuthona divae.      We swam around from the main peak, meandering around the surrounding pinnacles.  There were some sea lions that kept swimming down and buzzing us.  There were at least two, but maybe a few more.  Eventually, I noticed that one kept swimming behind an elephant ear sponge.  It seemed like it was gnawing at something back there, but I couldn't imagine what it was.  I was watching it, and videoing it, since it kept predictably returning to that one spot.  Then all of a sudden, it zipped down to the sponge and chomped down on it, breaking off a huge piece of the sponge!  I couldn't believe it.  I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised to see that from a creature that likes to play mola frisbee.  It did make me wonder about the fate of the elephant ear sponge on the side of the second sister, which I always assumed was destroyed by a diver's fin, a boat anchor, or a big storm.

We headed back in, and went via Beto's Reef, since that's how Rob likes to go.  I prefer to go back the way we came, because we get to our 70 foot bottle sooner, but today it was a good move.  We were scootering back, and I was basically just zooming along, kind of antsy to get to 70 feet, when Rob signaled me rather excitedly.  He was at one of the little drops in the reef, near the old wolf eel's den.  So I was thinking he was showing me the wolf eel, though his signal seemed a bit too excited for that.  I swam over, saw that he was giving me the "octopus" signal, and really couldn't believe he was stopping me to show me an octopus.  Until I looked.  Ooooh, that kind of octopus!  There's a GPO in the wolf eel's den!  It even had the nice tell-tale pile of crab shells just outside of it.  It was a pretty small one, but still a great find!

We headed in, and after getting onto our bottles, I suggested we hop over to Middle Reef.  It seemed like the bottom was even more churned up than it had been on the way out, but I was thinking that with the viz above the bottom being quite nice, the top of Middle Reef could be a rather scenic ride in.  So we headed over to Middle Reef, and Rob kept ignoring my overtures to go up to the top of the reef.  Then finally, when we got to our 40 foot stop, right by transect 4 (where we looked for, but did not find, the old resident warbonnet), I made it clear that I wanted to stay there for the 30 foot stop too.  Rob finally got it, and then realized that it was a gorgeous day on the top of the reef!  The water was bright blue and there was a nice school of blue rockfish hanging out in the kelp.  We pretty much spent the rest of deco, both our 30 and most of our 20 foot stop, in that spot, with Rob shooting pictures of the kelp and the rockfish (and occasionally me).  I think he got some of his best ever pictures of rockfish in the kelp!  Definitely a great way to pass the time on deco!

Once we finished up with the photo shoot, we headed in.  Rob's scooter got quite slow while we were in the cove; I think I could have swum faster than he was moving :P  When we surfaced, conditions were still great on the way out of the water, making for an easy time retrieving all of our gear.  We high-tailed it out of town, so we could make it back to San Jose in time for the Christmas party going on at Anywater Sports.

CRB (Meh)

Photo by Clinton Bauder

We were supposed to be on a boat on Saturday, but it got cancelled due to weather.  Considering how long it had been since I'd been diving, and I didn't have plans for the following weekend, I figured I should come up with some sort of alternative.  Sunday's forecast was looking pretty good, and it just kept getting better looking.  So Clinton, Rob, and I decided to head to Carmel for a shore dive on Sunday (no Lobos tickets, wah).  We went to Monastery first, which was definitely diveable, but not as epically calm as I was expecting (from the forecast).  There were also a TON of divers there, like so many that you might have to trip over them on the way into the water :)  So we decided to head to CRB, where I haven't been in years!

It took a bit of circling around before we finally found the right road to take to get to the stairs, but once we found it, we got the prime parking spot right across the street from the stairs.  We looked at the water, and while there were pretty big breakers out past the rocks, the entrance was protected enough.  Since its a long swim out to the "good parts", we brought scooters.  We also brought single tanks (since we'd had our eye on Monastery), and I think this may literally have been the first time I've ever scootered in just a single tank (that is, without a stage... not that I make a habit of single tank + stage dives either :P).  We schlepped the scooters and cameras and some tables down to the beach.  I decided to stage my rig down on the beach too.  I headed down to the beach, and as I was getting into my gear, I was having a ton of trouble with my drysuit inflator hose.  It just didn't want to connect to my drysuit inflator!  After forcing it a bit too much, I guess, the hose started to free flow.  Of course I was standing on the beach, by myself, in a not too convenient place to do a valve shutdown (on the left side of my H valve).  After some contortions, I got the thing shut down, just as Rob and Clinton arrived.  I thought it might be a bad Schrader valve, but Rob determined that it just needed to be tightened.

Photo by Clinton Bauder

It was a beautiful day on the beach, sunny, blue sky, nice-looking water, but man was it cold!  It was probably in the low 40s at its warmest (glad I wasn't one of the wetsuit divers at Monastery!)  We human buoyed it to get our scooters and cameras into the water, and although it was pretty calm and I just had a single tank on my back, it stilled seemed like I did everything in my power to almost drown as I got into the water.  I guess I need to shore dive more often.  Once we were all in the water, we headed out on the surface.  The color of the water from the surface was excellent.  It was bright blue, and we could see to the bottom even when we were in the 20 to 30 foot depth range.  Woohoo.  I was sure it was going to be an awesome dive.  We eventually decided to drop, somewhere in the 30 to 40 foot range, and when we got to the bottom, boy was I disappointed.  The bottom 5 to 10 feet had a layer of crap viz, I guess stirred up from the big swells.  Hmph.  We headed out, eventually getting to around 80 feet, and the viz did not improve.  It was actually kind of a chore to keep the team together, though that could have been related to Rob and Clinton taking pictures (and me occasionally video'ing).

Photo by Clinton Bauder

In addition to the crap viz, CRB has become a barnacle wasteland.  It was just ugly!  All of those little pinnacles that used to be covered in color are now just barren rock with barnacles.  I found some tiny patches Corynactis, but for the most part, there was none.  Like I said, I haven't been to CRB in ages, so I figured this is what the years of barnacle cycles have done to it.  But Rob and Clinton were there just a few months ago, and they said that this is a new phenomenon (which is good, I guess).  So hopefully it will bounce back soon.  Eventually we got to a patch of sand with tons of squid eggs (we'd since a bunch of patches of them already, on the way out), and we amused ourselves with those.  Clinton took some pictures of us with the eggs.  We killed a bunch of time out there and then headed in.

We scootered in almost all the way to the beach (to less than 10 feet), and then last part of the ride, above about 25 feet, the viz was excellent.  Unfortunately there was nothing to see in the crystal clear water except sand.  After we exited the water, I though my face was going to freeze on the way up the stairs.  Brrr.  Clinton said it was better than no dive at all, but I really wasn't sure.  Between the three of us, no one had anything worth posting from the day, but Clinton did send me some squid egg pics, so at least I have something to go along with the unenthusiastic report :)

A Nice Day in Big Sur

With Rob finally back from his big unemployment vacation, Team Kitty was on the Escapade for a tech charter.  As the weekend approached, the forecast was looking very good, but after our last epic fail attempt at Big Sur, I was not counting my chickens.  I was just hoping for a good dive at least as far south as Yankee Point :)  We did end up making it down to Big Sur, where we found much nicer conditions than last time (no whitecaps), as well as bright sunny blue skies that would hopefully mean bright water at the bottom.  Unfortunately we could not return to Sur D to try to retrieve our lost ball, since its depth wasn't appropriate for some of the divers on the boat, so we went to Sur 19 instead.  (I'm not sure if it's legal to say "unfortunately" and "we went to Sur 19" in the same sentence.)

Our team was the first in the water, and there was practically no surface current.  Once I realized that, I was just kind of bobbing on the surface, waiting for Rob and Kevin to join me at the ball.  Ahh, perfect Big Sur conditions.  We headed down the line, which was pretty limp for the first 90 or so feet, and then it flattened out, with a bit of a current just on top of the pinnacle.  It was nothing too substantial -- we spent most of the dive video'ing and taking pictures without the aid of our scooters, though at the end of the dive the current picked up to the point where I was using my scooter to position myself to pose in pictures (though Rob was still kicking to take pictures, but he's harder core than me).  But enough about the current.  The viz was excellent!  On the way down the line, I could see the whole site below me, and when we got to the bottom, we were greeted with very bright clear water.

Aside from the usual ginormous heads of pink and purple hydrocoral, there was the ever-present school of blue rockfish, though it wasn't particularly big today.  There were also a decent number of young rockfish, most of which were also blues, I think.  We found a mass of kelp greenling eggs on one head of hydrocoral, and elsewhere I found a kelp greenling that was acting territorial, though I couldn't find any nearby eggs.  Rob got some nice pictures and I got some pretty good video (pat self on back), so I will let those tell the rest of the story about the awesome conditions on the bottom!

On the ascent, we met a few playful sea lions who buzzed us several times.  This was fun, but it was just getting us prepared for dive 2, which was at Lobos Rocks.  Woohoo.  The wind was out of the south by the time we got up there, which made it difficult to anchor the boat on the south side, so we ended up liveboating, sort of.  When we got in the water, a bit further south of the pinnacles than usual, I looked down the kelp from the surface, and I could see a loooong way.  It looked like viz was going to be excellent here to.

We headed over to whether the sea lions like to zoom about on the west rock, and were playing with them for a while.  It was quite calm, even at 10 to 15 feet, which is where I was for the first 15 or so minutes, videoing and just generally watching the sea lions zoom around.  Eventually I noticed Rob and going a bit deeper, I figured to look for some green anemones to shoot, but I wanted to stay up with the sea lions, so I did not follow.  I assumed he would come back up to the shallows before moving on. But then after a minute or so, I realized that he was no longer down there, and he was just nowhere in sight.  At this point, Clinton and John had appeared, and were taking pictures and hanging out on the same ledge where I was watching the sea lions.  I asked them if I could hang out with them until my team re-appeared.

I pretty much went on with my dive for 5 or so minutes, but then when the kitties still had not returned, I figured I should go to the surface, since they might be there looking for me.  So I scootered south, away from the pinnacle (didn't want to surface in the whitewater) and surfaced.  I immediately saw Rob's bag, and saw that the boat was communicating with Rob and Kevin.  I guess they had been on the surface long enough that the boat was looking for me.  Oops.  So we met back up,  but I decided to thumb the dive, since I was at that point (20+ minutes at 10-15 feet) feeling a little bit seasick :)  I can never last more than 20 minutes that shallow at Lobos Rocks!  So I returned to the boat, and Rob and Kevin dropped back down for a bit longer.

Eventually everyone finished their dives, and we picked them up, and headed home.  The ride home was uneventful... no orcas :(

Cordell Bank 2013

In October, BAUE spent three days diving at Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary.  I've wanted to dive Cordell for years, and this year, it finally came together, thanks to a lot of planning work on Matt Vieta and Jim Capwell's part.  After failing to find a suitable dive boat close to Cordell, we eventually landed on moving the Escapade from Monterey to Bodega Bay.  We had a weather window of about 12 days (not sure I counted that right), and the plan was to watch the forecast, and if there was a window where we could get the boat up, dive, and get the boat back to Monterey, we would go.  As it turned out, the weather was perfect during the first week of our weather window, so on Monday afternoon, we got the official call that we would be attempting a dive on Tuesday morning.  The boat made it to Bodega Bay in much better time than expected, and then for the next 3 days, we had flat flat seas for the 20+ mile trip out to the bank from Bodega Bay.

It's taken me a long time to finish this report, mostly because I didn't really think that the report could possibly do the trip justice.  The diving was amazing!  Clinton put it best when he said something along the lines of how great it is when something you've dreamed about for years actually lives up to your expectations.  The second reason that it's taken a while to finish the report is that I've also spent a lot of time recently on video editing, making different versions of videos for different uses.  (And I'm still working on a final "project" video, which will have more than just footage from the dives.)  I've included a video per day in each of the posts, and a short summary video here.

Considering how delayed this report is, I will forgo the one-post-a-day thing, and just post it all at once.  So, without further ado...

Craine's Point
Northern East Ridge
Northern West Ridge
Not Diving in Fog

I don't think the report actually does do the trip justice, but hopefully the photos and video can help.  All of that is posted in the BAUE gallery.

Thanks to everyone who made the trip possible, including Matt, Jim, the crew of the Escapade, NOAA and the Cordell NMS people, the Bodega Bay Marine Laboratory (which provided housing), and Anywater Sports.