Diving Mortuary Beach...i.e. (Monastery Beach)

[PADI Cam]

Its been years since I doved Monastery Beach, but since then like clockwork, we always get divers who come from out of the area to dive the Monastery.. The problem is that the divers drive for hours, and if things are not right, rather than wait, they try to dive Monastery Beach with bad outcomes.

Anyway, from my own recollection, the proper way to dive Monastery is to avoid using the base of the horseshoe. Monastery is shaped like a horseshoe, with rocks on the northern and southern sides, and a beach area that has active surf (2-4 feet swells). So if you go up by the rock walls, and dive you don't get that surge that forces you on your face as you try to exit the water, which is known as the "crab walk".

Another problem is that Monastery is the start of the Monterey Canyon and begins to drop quite suddenly about a 100 feet from the shore, so once you're in the water, looking down at 80-90 feet, you see a black demarkation line which is the start of the canyon; that drops to around 1,000 feet quite suddenly. AND it's cold down there. So a Farmer John Wetsuit is required or maybe a dry suit....

Anyway, if you want to dive Monastery, go check with the local dive shops as you fill your air tanks, and they should give you a bit more than what I've mentioned.

Its been about 30 years since I dove, and the water still acts the same way as when I was in it in 1987...

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

I’ve never dived Monastery but have many buddies who have and have even know people who got into severe trouble diving that site.
There was a Gal who I met once that actually died for a few minutes after getting rag dolled in the surf at Monastery. She was revived on the beach but never fully recovered all her physical health from being incapacitated. She died 8 years later from complications from that incident while diving another site, ironically.
My buddies used to do full tech dives off the beach at Monastery with doubles and stage bottles. I used to hear hair haising stories about getting in and out. Once, one of them (Tom) never made it into the water because he was too pooped, so the others continued on. While he was hanging out on the beach, another unassociated buddy team came in. One of them unzipped his dry suit and went to the waters edge to rinse something in ankle deep water when a huge freak roller came in and knocked him down and began dragging him into the ocean. His unzipped drysuit completely flooded and made him so heavy that he couldn’t save himself. Tom had to go into the water in street clothes and save him since the other buddy was also in an unzipped drysuit.
An extremely unpridicable dangerous place. The surf there is deceivingly strong even though it may not look like it due to the power of the surge coming up from the abyss. There is no gradual shallowing sea floor to help break up the energy before it reaches the beach.

 

[runsongas]

monastery isn't bad when the conditions are good. just have to watch the swell forecast. I did my open water checkouts there.

You have to swim past the shallow reef area off North before it drops off into the trench, but there is plenty of area to just do a dive without going deeper than 40 or 45 ft. South side doesn't really get deeper than 70ft unless if you really work at it.