Don't mind the title, I am a day off, thats what I get for thinking I posted after midnight. These are May 16th reports...
After our Monastery dive today we decided to not push our luck and moved to Breakwater for the second dive. We planned to dive the Metridium Fields and would swim back along the pipe.
After suiting up, we followed Ron’s lead out to where he said we needed to drop down to be right on the fields. Boy, what a swim! We just kept going, and going. When we got there we did a quick check and chat about the site and then went down. As I was descending I was surprised that I dropped down right onto of a rock that was just loaded! I was quick enough on the inflater to get my buoyancy and hover just above them. I was quite excited.
I was in awe of how amazing the fields were with good vis. I was just swimming around looking in all the cracks and such for all kinds of critters and whatnot. I found some snails laying eggs, all kinds of various nudibranch’s and quite a few fish out in the cracks of the rocks or tucked into the medtridians. We spend just shy of 30 minutes out there exploring and checking things out. Again around 1700 psi, we began our swim back which included our swim along the pipe.
Once on the pipe the site did not let us down. There was an abundance of life and all kinds of inverts were out. There were more nudi’s I believe the ones I saw the most of were Spanish shawl’s. Actually none of us knew but this is now the second one I have seen and I would like to figure out what it was. At either rate, it was a very large nudibranch (probably 1-2 feet) and again it looked like a Spanish shawl. I so far have only seen these at Breakwater, and if Ron’s pictures come out ill have a picture to post so perhaps someone can confirm what it is.
Aside from all the other usual Monterey life (lingcod, nudi’s, starfish, etc.) I actually found an octopus that was about 9 inches long. Unfortunately, it looked like it was either sick or dying. Ron got a picture of it and once we put it back in the rocks it seemed to pull itself into a safe spot. So I don’t know but at least it wasn’t in the open anymore, sick or not. After that it was pretty uneventful and we finished our swim back to shore until we got to about 7 feet of water and surfaced.
On a side note there was some questioning a while back on Scuba Board about a brown and red fish that was hanging out in the rock kelp. Well I found another one today and about all I can add as to what it may be is it looked a lot like my Mandarin Gobies I used to have in my reef tank. (Im judging that on the look, and the swimming mannerism)
DIVE #20: 50′ Depth for 00:52 minutes with 51F water temperatures. We had about 20-25′of vis. This dive was with EANx34 and I had a PO2 of 0.85.
After our Monastery dive today we decided to not push our luck and moved to Breakwater for the second dive. We planned to dive the Metridium Fields and would swim back along the pipe.
After suiting up, we followed Ron’s lead out to where he said we needed to drop down to be right on the fields. Boy, what a swim! We just kept going, and going. When we got there we did a quick check and chat about the site and then went down. As I was descending I was surprised that I dropped down right onto of a rock that was just loaded! I was quick enough on the inflater to get my buoyancy and hover just above them. I was quite excited.
I was in awe of how amazing the fields were with good vis. I was just swimming around looking in all the cracks and such for all kinds of critters and whatnot. I found some snails laying eggs, all kinds of various nudibranch’s and quite a few fish out in the cracks of the rocks or tucked into the medtridians. We spend just shy of 30 minutes out there exploring and checking things out. Again around 1700 psi, we began our swim back which included our swim along the pipe.
Once on the pipe the site did not let us down. There was an abundance of life and all kinds of inverts were out. There were more nudi’s I believe the ones I saw the most of were Spanish shawl’s. Actually none of us knew but this is now the second one I have seen and I would like to figure out what it was. At either rate, it was a very large nudibranch (probably 1-2 feet) and again it looked like a Spanish shawl. I so far have only seen these at Breakwater, and if Ron’s pictures come out ill have a picture to post so perhaps someone can confirm what it is.
Aside from all the other usual Monterey life (lingcod, nudi’s, starfish, etc.) I actually found an octopus that was about 9 inches long. Unfortunately, it looked like it was either sick or dying. Ron got a picture of it and once we put it back in the rocks it seemed to pull itself into a safe spot. So I don’t know but at least it wasn’t in the open anymore, sick or not. After that it was pretty uneventful and we finished our swim back to shore until we got to about 7 feet of water and surfaced.
On a side note there was some questioning a while back on Scuba Board about a brown and red fish that was hanging out in the rock kelp. Well I found another one today and about all I can add as to what it may be is it looked a lot like my Mandarin Gobies I used to have in my reef tank. (Im judging that on the look, and the swimming mannerism)
DIVE #20: 50′ Depth for 00:52 minutes with 51F water temperatures. We had about 20-25′of vis. This dive was with EANx34 and I had a PO2 of 0.85.
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