Monterey Breakwater conditions this past weekend...

[np251]

Hey all

Had my first experience of Breakwater after a very long wait. Before i give my opinion, can anyone who was diving there this weekend give theirs regarding the conditions this past weekend- was the vis and surf typical, good or bad? id like a couple of opinions in order to orientate my internal 'judgement compass'... im just kinda curious considering the comment by a passing diver that 'only suckers shore dive here on days like this'...

To everyone who answered my BC thread- my zeagle brigade is ace, but took a little getting used to. Anyone who has one have any comments on stopping the weights from moving in the pockets without messing up the ripcord system? I had 10 pounds in each pocket and felt appreciable movement disurbing my trim.

The final question is kinda general- how concerned should i be about having difficulty getting everything on at the side of the entry? once in the water, doff/donning of the BC was easy as pie, but up at the parking lot, with 30pounds, it was hard without help. my instructor guy reckons im a size too big for the BC and then proceeded to tell me brand X was the best ever (coincidently, the other BC i was considering). But once in the water it felt very good and i had no problems.

Full report to follow soon...

cheers

Neil

 

[--tom--]

I'm going to be cautious on this answer because there was a lot of variables. First it was reasonably rough conditions for the time of year, but normal wave action for the winter months, not even difficult, really. (Note: I am specifically talking Breakwater)

The vis in the shallow areas were bad, mostly because of the chopped up kelp from the wave action, however if you got 500 yds off shore and deeper than 40', the vis was quite good. It was a fuzzy 25' @ the mertridiums.

Winter months will have less plankton and therefore better clarity, but fewer dive days because of the storms. All in all, I had several very nice dives this weekend...sure beat working.

 

[mweitz]

Whatever to people who say stuff like that.

I did a solid 60 dives at the BW and really learned to dive there. I had a few people tell me that I should really get away and do some different sites at the time, but I really wanted to hone my "skills" and learn to SCUBA before taking on some of the other sites. Just now after a couple of years and a couple hundred dives total I'm starting to feel that I am a decent diver. I'll never regret the year or so I spent diving there and once in a while most of the "big names" in local diving end up there for some reason or another.

As long as you learn each time you dive, then it was a good dive

Gear stuff takes about 10 dives to get used to it. You will dial things in and get more comfortable getting geared up and to the water.

Mark

 

[dannobee]

Well, how was it?

I dove Monastery twice on Sunday, and we had about 25-30 ft of vis and dolphins and whales on the surface intervals. And some renegade harbor seal took both of my fins off in a quarter of the time than I ever could.

The thing with breakwater is that if there are a lot of open water classes there, the vis will be really cloudy and it'll take a kickout to the bend in the pier before it clears up, or a surface swim to the metridium fields.

From now until the winter storms come in should be good diving, and even clearer if you head to Carmel instead of the Monterey dive sites, with the exception of maybe Coral Street, which seems to always have pretty good vis.