With light winds out of the WNW, high tide with 2' swells, roughly 55 degree surface and air temps, and a mostly cloudy sky (keeping the saturday beach crowd away), it was a beautiful day for diving. We selected Old Garden Beach as the site, unloaded our gear, and Mer and I took turns watching the stuff while the other parked about a block up a side street.
It was the first dive of the year for Mer, so we decided not to bother with hunting gear for the first dive and just have a nice checkout dive with minimal task loading. We suited up, and after a few extra minutes of gear tweaking we were ready to take a bearing and head out toward deeper water and the rock reef straight out from the beach.
After a short surface swim, we descended to sandy bottom and continued to follow our course out. Along the way, we noticed several winter skates as well as a medium sized moon snail or two, and soon the dark shapes of boulders began to loom out of the 10-15' vis.
As we crossed the rock reef and descended gradually to about 30', the water took on a blurry quality as we passed through an 8 degree thermocline into 27 degree water with 25+ foot vis. It was here that we ran into a maze of lobster trap lines, many of which we were able to successfully weave the flag line over or around.
Shortly after we turned the dive however, the flag snagged close to the surface, and we opted to abort, free ascend to a 15' safety stop for 3 minutes while reeling in line, then surface, untangle the line, and take a nice leisurely surface swim back to the beach as the sun began to break through the clouds.
The next dive also went well and ended with a free ascent and surface swim after 50-odd minutes, but the thermocline had moved to 23 feet as the tide went out. Visibility also appeared to deteriorate, but was greatly improved at depth.
We each caught lobsters, but all were unfortunately just shy of being legal. Mer also pointed a flounder out to me, which behaved (I think understandably) in a way I hadn't seen before... it ran away. Every flounder I had encountered previously was well camoflauged, and would remain still right up until being speared. This particular flounder had apparently not gotten settled in, and was clearly fish-colored. It didn't like odds I guess, and fled when it realized I was taking an interest.
The reef was very colorful, and we spotted several rock gunnel, a couple of sea ravens, a couple of flounder, numerous lobsters (some keepers), anemonae, urchin, and some unusually large northern sea stars, as well as a large school of pollock at depth (40' or so) over the course of the two dives we did.
No luck with the hunting though, so we grabbed a six pack of Bass Ale and hit the Causeway for some outstanding calamari and an order of prosciutto-wrapped scallops.
