How Cold are CA Waters?

[mikedarmody]

Lot's of good data in the responses. Bottomline you're talking about 50-60 degrees from the first thermocline (30-50 feet depending on location) down to 120 feet. Might as well plan on it. I find a 7mil wetsuit works fine for a 2 tank dive. But the real issue is the wetaher conditions for the surface interval. An hour in a cold squall (like last weekend) made me cold because you're standing around in a wet-wetsuit. I finding stripping down and putting on warm clothes for the interval really helped.

 

[Ishie]

Just how cold are the waters in CA? I ask in this forum since many needs for warm suits seem to come from there. I'm in Maine and to folks up here CA seems like the land of warm sunshine.

Heh heh heh...
This actually persists above water too, though it's fairly true for Sacramento except during our monsoon season. Right now it's a pleasant shade of gray out.

Where it's actually funny is San Francisco when the sun (if you can see it) goes down and the nights get cold fast. Mark Twain "the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco". Probably not as chilly as Maine though...

Are there Pacific Currents that keep the ocean chilly?

Yup, Alaska sends us their water to make sure we remember they're up there.

Our surface temp (at .6M) just dipped below 50F today for the first time this fall.

Not sure what the temp is right now... I'll find out Saturday. I dive Monterey. Coldest so far was a pleasant 48 degrees on the surface in May. One of the few times I wore my hood after putting my face down in the water without it. So far the warmest I've had it in Monterey was 62 degrees, which apparently is uncommon, but soooo nice. I went to LA for a lobster trip over Halloween and had a 60 degree bottom temp at 50 feet on a night dive... water was warmer than the air.

If I had to take the average temp we've experienced there, it's been about 55?

Ishie

 

[spectrum]

Right now in Southern Maine we're running around 47 F. Best we see in the summer is mid sixties, these are surface temperatures out at the buoy. You can have a treat if you're in sheltered water and the tide has risen over warm flats. We get a little help from the gulf stream but we're just far enough out of it's path to get a lot of influence.

http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/dsdt/cwtg/natl.html

Thanks for all of the input everyone.

Pete