Monterey sea lions

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Does anyone know? Is it because the water is polluted? I'm not sure why they would be naturally smelly.
 
Their smelly cause there's lots of them and they have to poop somewhere :D

It looks a lot like it did last week when I dove breakwater.

Does anyone know why the sudden infestation?
Were they displaced from somewhere else?
 
ERP once bubbled...

Does anyone know why the sudden infestation?
Were they displaced from somewhere else?

Here is the story i heard saturday.

Supposedly they migrate from mexico and are suppose to be mostly male sea lions. I know they migrate every year but have never seen so many at one time. I was also told a lot of them are extremely weak and some are dying from the long trip.

A few years back one of the guys that deal with sea lions for a living explained the whole cycle to me but i forgot the details. I guess i was more worried about diving than migration habits of sea lions :D
 
It's also got to be very unhealthy for them to swim in their own poo. That just doesn't seem right. Perhaps it further degrades their health.
 
With that many sea lions, and the obviously large amount of poop they generate, are there equipment issues? Does it affect the diving around Breakwater?

BTW, I hope that wasn't your boat;-0
 
The water at Breakwater is always bad in the summer months. Vis drops to 1 foot and below at times. I don't think that the vis is a result of Seal waste, it's the plakton. As the sun heats the water, the plankton blooms and multiplies making vis really poor. Dive breakwater in January, it's very nice.
 
amandasdaddy once bubbled...
The water at Breakwater is always bad in the summer months. Vis drops to 1 foot and below at times. I don't think that the vis is a result of Seal waste, it's the plakton. As the sun heats the water, the plankton blooms and multiplies making vis really poor. Dive breakwater in January, it's very nice.

Get a load of this. I went diving with ERP today and we had about 20+ ft of vis at breakwater once we got below the muck at around 15-20ft deep. The water was a chilly 50deg on the surface according to my vytec. I actually got a bit chilly in my drysuit and dry gloves at about 45 minutes into the first dive. :D
 
Breakwater seems to suffer from pretty much the same phenomena as the puget sound, plancton blooms and vis goes to 0. Unfortunately breakwater is too shallow to get under the blooms, most places in the sound once you get below 35-40ft, it's dark but the vis improves dramatically. About the only way to get much deeper than 40ft at breakwater seems to be to bring a spade :D

I think we were lucky yesterday, because it'd been cloudy for a couple of days, there wasn't as much of a bloom to get under. The exact mechanism doesn't really matter much, all that I'm interested in is that the dive was great.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/teric/

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