May 05 Dive Reports

[Peter McGuinness]

Scripps Canyon: 4:30pm Saturday
Depth: 115ft
Time 35 mins
Vis 5ft to 10ft but variable, and very dark.
Critters seen: Lots of nudis - Porter's, MacFarland's, and a good scattering of various doriospis.
Legendii: none
Sunken Helicopters: none

At last, I managed to get to dive scripps again! Three of us ordinary mortals teamed up with a local diving legend to dive in scripps this afternoon. Conditions looked good on the surface, with no surf and just a little chop, although the day had become overcast by the time we set out. At the cable, the legend - who was experimenting with a quintuply redundant system by sporting a necklace of multiple dive computers, each one differentially tuned to the precise offgassing rate of a specific body tissue and/or cavity - set off in an inexplicably easterly direction while my buddy and I descended into the canyon to find the metridium patch.

It was dark, and the vis wasn't great but we had an excellent dive with all the usual color and fauna of a canyon dive, including five small swell sharks tucked into various crevices between 90 and 75ft. Also saw one sea cucumber of the buried-in-a-crack-with-only-the -fronds-sticking-out type, which I have never seen in the canyon before. Unfortunately, all of my photos sucked.

We returned to the car park to find that the legend and his buddy had enjoyed an interesting blue-water swim and he is now planning a sextuply redundant compass setup.

A good day was had by all.

Peter

 

[headhunter]

i'm going snorkeling in laguna beach tommorrow.
any sugestions on where to go?
how were condtions today?

Hi Melionda,

A few of us went to Montage Resort/Treasure Island in South Laguna Beach today and were commenting that it looked like a great place to snorkel since it was so shallow.

Let us know where you wind up going and how you liked it!

Christian

 

[mccabejc]

Date: 5/28/05
Dive Location: Montage Resort, Laguna Beach
Time: 9:45 am
Bottom Time: 38:40
Max Depth: 33 ft.
Vis: 3-8 ft. (yeah, I know it was higher, it just felt that low…)
Wave height: 1-2
Temp at depth: 55 deg. F Suunto
Surface Temp: Water 57 deg. F Suunto, Air 64 F
Tide information: -0.8 ft. @ 8:30 am

Myrna and I met up with Christian, Lexy, Stryker, Kelphelper, ScottM, and SBDiver at the Montage Resort in Laguna. Found out that the parking fee in the parking structure has increased to $1.50 per hour, 3 hr. maximum. The machines take bills or coins. Also found out that the site description on the Laguna Sea Sports website is way out of date. The info was last updated before the Montage Resort was built, and recommends parking way down at Aliso beach and walking. Yikes. The Sandeaters description is the one to use (http://www.geocities.com/sandeaters/sites/mr.htm). Many thanks to Melvin for all his work on this site.

This was my first time at this location, and it was gorgeous. Myrna's new favorite beach. Lots of places to explore, and looks like a great snorkeling site. Great facilities for the public, including restrooms and an outdoor shower right next to the parking structure, and restrooms at the far west end of the resort. There are also picnic tables in the beautifully manicured park along the top of the cliffs, and a public walkway along the length of the resort. Not sure if the picnic tables are for the public or only those staying at the resort, but I'm gonna find out.

Immediately below the parking structure is a wide expanse of beach. Access to the beach is a long walk West (maybe 300-400 yards?) to your choice of stairs or a ramp. To the west of that beach area is a cove, and another set of stairs. On the west side of that cove is Goff Island, which used to be an island prior to the Montage Resort development, but is now a part of the beach. There is also a separate ramp leading down to the beach near Goff Island.

We decided to enter at the near beach and head west (Melvin’s “Plan B”), then re-decided to enter at the Goff Island Cove (Melvin’s “Plan A”). When we finally got down there we re-re-decided to form a “Plan C”: enter on the west side of Goff Island, swim out west to avoid the shallow reef around Goff, drop down at 30-40 ft., then swim at a 130 heading (southeast) parallel to shore back towards the parking structure (see attached image). SBDiver and Chrisitan and I buddied up, and made a nice easy entry into the virtually non-existent surf, then surface swam, and swam, and swam, probably further than a Deadman’s swim, until Christian’s depthfinder showed about 30ft. The others dropped down closer to shore. We dropped down in the sand, and a murky viz of somewhere around 5 ft. We got our bearings, and headed at 130 along the sand. There was a major thermocline during the dive: the shallow areas seemed very warm and murky, and the cold areas were freakin’ frigid, with a bit higher viz. Most of the dive I was spending my time making sure I didn’t lose my buddies, since a separation of about 10 ft. meant they pretty much disappeared. We did see some interesting structure, but not a lot of life. Though I would find out later, during lunch, that others were a lot more observant than I was We did meet up with Stryker, who motioned to us to look at an octopus in a crevice. Occasionally Christian would ping in the murkiness to find some structure and we’d make a detour to check it out. Otherwise we continued on our 130 heading. Then SBDiver motioned he was getting low on air, and we headed up. When we surface we realized we were just offshore from Goff Island (yellow line in attached image), and decided to surface swim to the beach near the parking structure (red line in attached image). That was about 40 minutes of surface swim, for a 38 minute dive.

All in all it was an invigorating dive, and when the viz clears up I’d imagine this would be a great dive spot. Afterwards we all headed over to Ruby’s for some lunch, then the others headed over to Cleo St. It was getting to be around 1:30pm, so Myrna and I decided to head home and get some chores done.

 

[MaxBottomtime]

Date: 5/29/05
Dive Location: Barge offshore of Huntington Beach
Time: 12:21
Bottom Time: 32 minutes
Max Depth: 98 feet
Vis: 10-15
Wave height: 2-4
Temp at depth: 50F
Surface Temp: Warm and dirty.
Gas mix: Air (21%)
Comments: After searching for new wrecks for a few hours we motored over to a barge near the oil rigs. Lots of metridiums, Blacksmith, a large Calico bass and a large Treefish. Red tide, red tide, go away!

 

[Stryker]

Vis: 3-8 ft. (yeah, I know it was higher, it just felt that low…)

I checked.... it was a nice healthy 17.... just dark.... felt like a dusk dive dont you think??

 

[Peter McGuinness]

Scripps Canyon: 2:00PM
Depth 110ft
Time 36 mins
Critters seen: Mostly nudibranchs and fish - lots and lots of nudibranchs and fish!
Legendii: ONE!!!! Yes, folks, my first sighting of the Scripps Ness Monster.
Sadly, sunken helicopters were absent.

Surf: not much but a bit more than yesterday
Quite a bit of surface chop, this time, and along with two tech diver types who insisted on hanging onto the bouyline as they went down, it was bloody hard to find the damn thing, alright? Didn't your kindergarden teacher tell you to share, eh? They should add that to the TDI course, in my opinion.

Have you noticed how most dive reports leave out the best bits? Like the floating feeling of being in amongst the awe inspiring crags and crevasses of a truly impressive canyon? The feeling that you have left this planet to be, for a short time, in a world where weight has no meaning and the unbearable lightness of being has its apotheosis? This was such a day.

The vis was average but even so, scripps gave of its best, with color and scale to match any dive you will make.
Sure, it was cold, and the local diving legend (LDL) insisted on doing the macarena at 110ft, but we can endure these things for the beauty and grandeur of our sport.

We saw more nudibranchs than you could shake a stick at, and a couple of swell sharks lurking in the cracks. The light was just awesome - something you must see to appreciate - even in moderate vis the unseen bulk of the far wall channels the light into the canyon so that there is an aura above in which the shoals of blacksmith swim like flocks of starlings in the air. With the overhanging ledges and the growths of strawberry anemones and sponges - ah, you should see it!

Contrast this with the snot and surge of the shallows before exit, and you can understand why the practitioners of our sport stay with the prosaic and the practical, but there is not a diver here who would not recognise my romantic picture.

Peter

 

[MaxBottomtime]

Date: 5/30/05
Dive Location:Marineland
Time: 9:00
Bottom Time: 37 minutes
Max Depth: 46 feet
Vis: 15 feet
Wave height: 1-2
Temp at depth: 51F
Comments: Jeff Shaw joined me for another attempt to find the tire covered structure Christian found in February. BTW, it was nice meeting you and Dave (Dazedone) in the parking lot. We were unsuccessful again, but still had fun. Jeff lost his mask while entering the water. Despite the good vis close to shore we couldn't find it. Being DIR I always have a spare mask in my pocket. After the dive we went back to the entry pouint to look for Jeff's mask. Four of us got back in the water and looked for about five minutes before giving up. As we were leaving the point Jeff spotted his mask on a rock about five feet above the ground. Some nice person retrieved it, either from the water or on the beach and left it where Jeff was able to see it. The four intrepid mask searchers joined Drysuit Greg for a dive debriefing at Starbucks. After dropping Jeff off at his house I realized I had left my wallet at Starbucks. All the way there I was thinking to myself how much hassle it was going to be to replace my Driver's License, ATM card, Nitrox card, insurance, AAA, Social Security, Hollywood Video, Vons, Albertsons and Ralph's cards and anything else I couldn't think of at the time. Fortunately, another nice person found my wallet and turned it in at the Starbucks counter. Great day for a recovery!
We did manage to see lots of Globe crabs and Moonsnails.

 

[FengShui]

Date: 5/28/05
Dive Location: Refugio Beach, Santa Barbara County
Time: 4:30pm
Bottom Time: 55 minutes
Max Depth: 29 feet
Vis: 10-15 feet
Wave height: 1-2
Temp at depth: 56F
Comments: Three of us had an excellent dive up at Refugio on Saturday. Originally we were going to go to Goleta Beach, but the vis there didn't look too great, so we fell back to Refugio instead. As one would expect for Memorial Day weekend, it was quite busy up there, but there was plenty of day use parking available. We had a nice 50 minute dive, with lots of Sea Urchins collected for dinner and a beautiful 3 foot Angel Shark sleeping in the sand just outside the kelp. We tried to wake it up and see if it would swim but it could care less about a few divers kicking water at it.

 

[mccabejc]

Hey Christian, how many more dives will we make MaxBottomtime do at Marineland before we tell him we were just kidding?

All seriousness aside, maybe sometime we can team up with our depth finders and see if we can find it. Sucker was big.

By the way, on a totally different subject, Myrna and I went to Montage Resort in Laguna today just because it's such a neat place, and from the looks of it we picked just the right day to dive there on Saturday. In spite of a really nice swell model (lots of blue all over), there was big surf today, lots of foam in the water, and the water was pretty brown. Where we entered on Saturday was where a group of surfers were catching 4-5 ft. waves today.

I took some pictures, including a photo from inside the Montage looking at the pool.

 

[dazedone]

Phil,

We spotted the mask rolling in the surf and I went over and put it up on the rock where it wouldn't wash away. I had to return the good karma from the person who found my Jetfin there and you who let me know about it.

-David

Jeff lost his mask while entering the water. Despite the good vis close to shore we couldn't find it. Being DIR I always have a spare mask in my pocket. After the dive we went back to the entry pouint to look for Jeff's mask. Four of us got back in the water and looked for about five minutes before giving up. As we were leaving the point Jeff spotted his mask on a rock about five feet above the ground. Some nice person retrieved it, either from the water or on the beach and left it where Jeff was able to see it.