great white sighting

[bowlofpetunias]

Wow.. amazing experiences .. thanks for sharing! I could almost picture myself there. I definitely have to get back to dive Calif!

 

[FrankPro1]

The water looked reasonably clear - probably similar to Fry's, with 15-20 ft vis, but some particulates especially around the kelp beds.

This will be my 4th consecutive summer doing this trip to Santa Cruz and the last two times had about 20ft of viz with some suspended particulates. The very first time "ofcourse when I brought only minimal gear, no kayak and no scuba" there was incredible visibility, probably in the 50ft range. Luckily northern swells are pretty much non-existent during the summer months, so Scorpion is usually a safe bet.

We only spent one night at Scorpions. In retrospect we wish we'd stayed two nights, because the next night we headed over to Smugglers on the back side - BIG mistake! The south swell was still in force, although we didn't realize how bad it was until we'd made the boneheaded move of dingying to shore for a hike, and then discovered the waves were too big for us to get back to our boat! We tried launching from the beach, but got swamped and almost sucked out to sea in a rip. It took us two hours to finally be able to get through the surf zone, and we had to carry that heavy dingy over crumbly rocks 1/3 of a mile to the other end of the beach where the waves were breaking closer in, so we were able to paddle past the surf zone during a flat interval. But it was scary for a while - we were thinking we might end up having to spend the night on the deserted beach, cold and soaking wet with no food or water! We were pretty thrilled to get back on our boat, lemme tell ya.

Wow! What an adventure! Exploring the northern islands can be quite a balancing act, the weather there can be quite unforgiving. Glad you made it out ok.