Algae once bubbled...
I was hoping to get some input on good dive sites in Santa Barbara. The hubby and I were hoping to sneak away for a quick trip Halloween weekend and I heard the water up there is do able.
We are fairly new to diving (about 11 dives to our name) and 99% of our dives have been beach dives (we are pretty good at dealing with surf.) Are there any good beach dives in SB or can someone recommend a good dive boat that does just one day dives (I've found a lot of 2 or 3 day trips)?
-Algae
There are a number of good shore diving sites in Santa Barbara, although the visibility you're going to get probably won't exceed 10-12' by the shore.
http://www.shorediving.com/ has a nice list of sites in this area, as does the UCSB scuba club:
http://orgs.sa.ucsb.edu/scuba/divespots.htm We were out at Refugio over the weekend, and vis was about 10'. It was a nice dive, although it's a bit of a swim out to the kelp.
As for dive boats, there is only one company that runs public boats out of SB, Truth Aquatics. They do tend to specialize in multi-day trips, although most months one of their boats does more single-day trips. If truth is full or they don't have a single day trip, you'll have to go down to Ventura. All of the boats down there are good, but we usually prefer the Spectre, as they do 4 dives per day and have a hot tub. They also cater to newer divers as there's almost always a class on the boat on the weekends. All of the ventura boats are listed on
http://www.californiadiveboats.com/ so you can look there for phone numbers, web sites, and the like. They sell out some weekends, so call ahead.
If you have any other questions about Santa Barbara area diving, feel free to PM me.
--Ted
