Returning from three wonderful days of diving Monterey, Ken and I were talking over plans for Monday (we both had the day off.)
"
How about Marineland?", he said.
"
Sure", I said. "
Great idea. Vis couldn't be worse than it was at the Breakwater today... 3 feet was pretty amusing on a scooter!"
Monday morning, we rolled into the construction site that is now Terranea.
Glassy calm water. Blazing sunshine with cool breezes.
1 foot surf. Some surge, (but certainly manageable after it pushed us around a bit.)
And.... we could see through the water.
We could see rocks! Through the Water!!!! Holy Cow!!!!!
Entering at the point, we could easily see the bottom at our descent point, 30 feet below us.
The vis was never less than 40 feet all over the pinnacles at the Point, continuing 2/3's of the way back to Cobble Beach. As we did mid-water rolling stops at 40, 30, 20, and 10 fsw, we could easily see crabs and rocks on the bottom and glittering silver at the surface. Pretty dang cool!
The 7 species of nudibranchs, although tiny by Monterey standards, were fun to find and lovely to look at: Cuthona laying eggs, D. albopunctatas, Clowns, FedEx's, trilineatas, San Diego dorids, Limbaughs cadlina.
Hermissenda crassicornis eggs are EVERYwhere out at the point, from 30 to 60 fsw.
I think there is about to be an outrageous population explosion in the next days/weeks. Watch for it! (Could navanax be far behind?
)
Some days just work out in spite of all other plans. This was one of those.
~~~~~~
Claudette
MaxBottomtime:
The surf was up today and vis was zero, nada, zilch. The security guard (Julian) told me that today was the last day we could park in the main lot. Of course, we heard that last month as well.