sharkdiver00:
Scubajunkie,
did you have to rub it in
today was still over 90F, still flat.... hope you guys have a good time on the wkend. Think of me when you kiss the snow
Well it turns out I didn't go snowboarding this weekend after all. I got a call from a buddy with a boat who wanted to go spearfishing. There's no way I'd pass up an opportunity to dive of an inflatable and go spearfishing. Besides it's still early in the snowboard season; I guess I'll board the weekend of Thanksgiving. Here my dive report from last saturday, Oct. 30th:
hi everyone,
I got a chance to do some diving and spearfishing last saturday. I went out with a new dive buddy, Dennis, who has a 14' inflatable. We motored from the Breakwater launch ramp to Aumentos Reef (Monterey, CA).
1st dive:
max depth: 80 fsw
Bottom time: 30 min
Temp: 57F
Gas: 34% Nitrox
Viz: up to 40 ft in some areas
We rolled in and followed the anchor line to the bottom. Right off the bat, the viz was awesome. At times I was a good 15-20 feet away from my buddy and can still see him clearly. A few minutes into the dive, dennis pointed out a large fish in the water. At
first I thought it was a whale. Turns out it was a huge mola mola. We swam towards it and hovered right above it. It was over 10 feet wide! Afterwards, we proceeded back to the main reef looking for lingcod. Dennis was set on finding Ling-zilla and bringing it
home for dinner. I on the other hand, just bought a new speargun and was looking for a tasty cabezon or anything else of legal size. As luck would have it, Dennis spotted a nice size cabezon, about 15-20" long. He motioned for me to take it since his heart was set on only taking a Ling. After getting the cabezon on the stringer, I spent considerable time getting my speargun ready for the next target--I'll need to practice this a bit more to get it together faster. My buddy gave me the signal that he was getting low on air, so we turned around and headed for the boat. We spent about an hour and a half on our surface interval before dropping in again.
Dive 2:
max Depth: 80 fsw
bottom time: 37 min.
Temp: 59F
gas: Air
viz: still around 40 ft
We rolled in the water again. Now instead of trying to put on my bc on the boat then rolling in, I decided to clip the bc off in the water and put it on that way. it was so much easier than struggling in the boat. We proceeded back down to the reef in search of the elusive ling-zilla. We swam down through large schools of blue rockfishes and I said to myself, "If I don't find any ling, I'll at least take a blue home".
We I got lucky again and decided to leave the blue for another day. I came upon a vermillion rockfish, and it was the biggest i've ever seen. It actually swam towards me and had no idea I was going to have it for dinner. I removed the safety on my speargun and shot at the fish just as it turn away from me. My buddy came out of the water empty handed and now has to wait until January to hunt for his favorite fish.
Overall a great day, though the wind and swell picked up and almost made me too woozy to hold my breakfast down. If we stuck around any longer i would have fed
the fishes...yuck.
Those were dive #97 and 98. two more and I hit 100 dives since getting certified in November 2000.
Ericson
aka da' ScubaJunkee
