Reeveseye
Contributor
My wife and I were there yesterday, and we had a great time! We normally avoid the dive park on weekends in the summer due to the crowds, but since it was an event for the benefit of some important charities, we decided to go anyway. As it turned out, we had a great time!
For those of you who don't know, the Gold Star dive is a "treasure hunt" of sorts, where divers search for gold badge-shaped stars scattered throughout the dive park. We were very impressed by how smoothly things ran. LASD (Los Angeles Sheriff's Department) seems to have this event down to a science. It was well-organized and ran quickly, with the help of the American Divers organization, who also donated a lot of good prizes for the raffle. I was especially impressed by the people they had posted on the stairs, who helped you out of the water and took your fins off for you. Nice touch. And the chocolate stars they gave you in exchange for the ones found on the bottom were just the sugar rush I needed after a couple of dives! Best of all, we won a nice Pelican 4300 dive light in the raffle afterwards. And it's always good to run across our resident Catalina SB'er, Dr. Bill. Hurry up and finish your "Dive Dry" species ID videos, doc - I'm dying to see them!
Pretty good diving, too. Vis was a little down due to a lot of particulates in the water, but it was still pretty good in the shallows. We went over on the 6:15 boat and got an early dive in. We headed to the Sue-Jac, and hit a thermocline that took us from 64 degree water to 57. My wife found some critters we'd never seen before, which is always a highlight of our dives. We found our gold stars within the first five minutes of the second dive, and spent the rest of the time along Big Casino Reef, which is out of bounds on the treasure hunt, so we were out of everyone else's way. We did a third dive after that, and spent it in the 15' - 20' shallows west of the stairs (until the constant surge made my wife feel "barfy", according to what she wrote on my slate). Best of all, she found two abalone in different parts of the park. It'd be nice to hope they might come back some day in decent numbers. I got a lot of good photos, which I'll post in my gallery in the next few days.
All in all, it was a very good day to dive. We'll try to be there every year from now on.
For those of you who don't know, the Gold Star dive is a "treasure hunt" of sorts, where divers search for gold badge-shaped stars scattered throughout the dive park. We were very impressed by how smoothly things ran. LASD (Los Angeles Sheriff's Department) seems to have this event down to a science. It was well-organized and ran quickly, with the help of the American Divers organization, who also donated a lot of good prizes for the raffle. I was especially impressed by the people they had posted on the stairs, who helped you out of the water and took your fins off for you. Nice touch. And the chocolate stars they gave you in exchange for the ones found on the bottom were just the sugar rush I needed after a couple of dives! Best of all, we won a nice Pelican 4300 dive light in the raffle afterwards. And it's always good to run across our resident Catalina SB'er, Dr. Bill. Hurry up and finish your "Dive Dry" species ID videos, doc - I'm dying to see them!
Pretty good diving, too. Vis was a little down due to a lot of particulates in the water, but it was still pretty good in the shallows. We went over on the 6:15 boat and got an early dive in. We headed to the Sue-Jac, and hit a thermocline that took us from 64 degree water to 57. My wife found some critters we'd never seen before, which is always a highlight of our dives. We found our gold stars within the first five minutes of the second dive, and spent the rest of the time along Big Casino Reef, which is out of bounds on the treasure hunt, so we were out of everyone else's way. We did a third dive after that, and spent it in the 15' - 20' shallows west of the stairs (until the constant surge made my wife feel "barfy", according to what she wrote on my slate). Best of all, she found two abalone in different parts of the park. It'd be nice to hope they might come back some day in decent numbers. I got a lot of good photos, which I'll post in my gallery in the next few days.
All in all, it was a very good day to dive. We'll try to be there every year from now on.