A Stormy Day... Is This June, or August, or Winter?

The wind was howling and the seas were rough when we started out. Had to pull inside Long Point and dive Pirate's Cove as the only sheltered site along that stretch of coast. Friends of mine (Anastasia and Jeffrey) were on board as was a group of Christian divers who wore t-shirts that said "He died for Us, We Dive for Him" on the back. T

hey were very nice folks and didn't proselytize at all.

First dive site A & J followed me. I wasn't running into much at the site. Found a blue towel on the bottom at 30 ft and was filming it when two mating sheep crabs ran right onto the towel! I filmed them and continued to follow them as they remained "coupled." Actually it looked like they were finished mating and the male was just holding onto the female to allow time for his sperm to fertilize her eggs before another male got a chance... a strategy I don't think I will try! Then I saw a school of what I thought were corbina. When I edited the footage I saw that they were spotfin croaker instead so I was pleased they just drifted and allowed me to film them. After leaving the croakers, I startled a harbor seal. I was able to get a few quick shots of it, but for the most part it stayed well off in the kelp forest. Second dive site was Yellowtail Reef where the bat rays had created zero vis a week or two ago. I dropped down to depth (50 ft) and tried to go deeper. I didn't recognize any of the features as I swam along. When I looked at my depth gauge, I was still at the same depth! I had been swimming along shore instead of offshore.

Came back up to the reef itself (30-40 ft) but really didn't find the best part of it. When I surfaced, the boat was MUCH farther away than I even imagined. Turned out the boat had dragged anchor... several times. It was well offshore (quarter mile) in an area where the GWS hunt. It was quite a surface swim to the boat, a good workout for this old geezer. One of the women panicked and her eyes glazed over while she was swimming back to the boat. Her husband towed her, and the wife of another guy who had become disoriented and was heading out to sea. The DM went in and rescued them and we did a live boat pickup of the other 8 divers. I helped bring in the tired divers on the swim step.

Exciting! Third dive was Garibaldi Reef to look for soupfin sharks. No one saw any. I did run into several horn sharks and filmed a few. At the end of the dive I ran into an octopus out in the open and he let me follow him for about 5 min. filming as he walked around in the open.

Cool. When I surfaced, the boat was again much further away than I expected. It had swung 180 degrees on the anchor chain because the wind had kicked up. Fortunately the surface current took me almost directly towards the boat so it was a long but easy swim.

11:34 AM - 6/30/2006 - post comment

What's going on

with your f o r m a t t i n g?

rickydazla - 11:37 PM - 6/30/2006

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Don't Know

I tried to fix it several times without any luck. At least now it is broken into paragraphs.

DrBill - 7:19 AM - 7/1/2006

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