Ben_ca
Contributor
(Sorry a bit long and no pictures... got lazy)
I've been out of town for a while and out of the water for about a month and so has my buddy Ted so back to the bunny slopes for us to know some of the rust off.
We took it slow and hit AWS first for their big Christmas sale... The chance to win a reg in the raffle was a good enough excuse to get a late start....
After hearing the sales pitch and cruising the shop for deals (and missing out on some really good ones) we hit the road and rolled into Monterey at noon to find plenty of front row parking and thinning crowds at the Breakwater.
The skies were clear and the sun was out, and reports from the other divers were of un-Breakwaterish vis.
We set up the scooters, doubles, and geared up. Gear matches and dive brief went smoothly and we agreed on a plan to shake down the gear/scooter on the initial leg out to the wall... S drill before heading out to the Barge then figure it out from there.
We hit the water and wow! The water was crystal clear... a little chopped salad in the surf zone but really clear as we waded in. Usually as you drop down past the bend in the wall the vis drops due to the roto-finning of the new guys doing tours of the wall (Sorry new guys... not really your fault- but look behind next time
) but this time there were no clouds of silt hanging in the water column and very few snot-cycles and other "stuff" in the water...
at 7 mins we hit the land mark and turned north....
And after 7 more minutes we were at the Barge. All the typical characters were there including a school of rockfish trying to hide on the far side of the barge. out of the corner of our eye we could also see a young sealion following us ,,, dunno if it's the same one we kept seeing throughout the whole dive but it could have been. We spent 15 mins kicking around and still had plenty of gas and trigger time so we then prep'ed for our long leap to the Met fields.
We got our bearings and then hit the trigger... this leg is long and bit boring... sand and anemonies and nother else... but with the vis being so good it felt like it was a diferent place... we went wing to wing trying to locate the main fields but missed.... I think we were too deep, it was low tide and we did not compensate for that. We did find a nice little heap of rocks with remnants of an old net on it that I've never recalled seeing so we called that good (hey there were some Metridiums on it). We then headed south to get shallower and closer to the wall.... we paused at the "cannon" to check it out. I've never gotten good bearing on this landmark so we shot a bag tied it off and surfaced to find out it's right near the bend in the wall about 150 ft from it... a lot closer than I thought it was. we dropped back down cleaned up the bag then meandered in the shallows dodging other divers for an 85 min dive...
Cleaned up and some chowder at the Chowder house and then hit the road. A great stress free dive with a good buddy and great conditions.
Go out and dive!
I've been out of town for a while and out of the water for about a month and so has my buddy Ted so back to the bunny slopes for us to know some of the rust off.
We took it slow and hit AWS first for their big Christmas sale... The chance to win a reg in the raffle was a good enough excuse to get a late start....
After hearing the sales pitch and cruising the shop for deals (and missing out on some really good ones) we hit the road and rolled into Monterey at noon to find plenty of front row parking and thinning crowds at the Breakwater.
The skies were clear and the sun was out, and reports from the other divers were of un-Breakwaterish vis.
We set up the scooters, doubles, and geared up. Gear matches and dive brief went smoothly and we agreed on a plan to shake down the gear/scooter on the initial leg out to the wall... S drill before heading out to the Barge then figure it out from there.
We hit the water and wow! The water was crystal clear... a little chopped salad in the surf zone but really clear as we waded in. Usually as you drop down past the bend in the wall the vis drops due to the roto-finning of the new guys doing tours of the wall (Sorry new guys... not really your fault- but look behind next time
) but this time there were no clouds of silt hanging in the water column and very few snot-cycles and other "stuff" in the water... at 7 mins we hit the land mark and turned north....
And after 7 more minutes we were at the Barge. All the typical characters were there including a school of rockfish trying to hide on the far side of the barge. out of the corner of our eye we could also see a young sealion following us ,,, dunno if it's the same one we kept seeing throughout the whole dive but it could have been. We spent 15 mins kicking around and still had plenty of gas and trigger time so we then prep'ed for our long leap to the Met fields.
We got our bearings and then hit the trigger... this leg is long and bit boring... sand and anemonies and nother else... but with the vis being so good it felt like it was a diferent place... we went wing to wing trying to locate the main fields but missed.... I think we were too deep, it was low tide and we did not compensate for that. We did find a nice little heap of rocks with remnants of an old net on it that I've never recalled seeing so we called that good (hey there were some Metridiums on it). We then headed south to get shallower and closer to the wall.... we paused at the "cannon" to check it out. I've never gotten good bearing on this landmark so we shot a bag tied it off and surfaced to find out it's right near the bend in the wall about 150 ft from it... a lot closer than I thought it was. we dropped back down cleaned up the bag then meandered in the shallows dodging other divers for an 85 min dive...
Cleaned up and some chowder at the Chowder house and then hit the road. A great stress free dive with a good buddy and great conditions.
Go out and dive!
