Warning... loooong post!
***THE BOAT***
We got to the Vision at about 8pm Wednesday night, and it was already starting to fill up! It was a bit disorganized, with no one obviously in charge, but we found a spot on deck for our bag (we consolidated into one to save space) and our tanks, and found our bunk downstairs.
Even in the dark, our first impressions of the boat were that it was a lot roomier than we were used to! The deck had lots of open space to gear up, with a wide platform in the center to put dive bags on. The tanks stand up along the sides of that platform; then there's a wide aisle between the rows of tanks and the outside rail, against which there are wide benches to help get suited up. There are port and starboard exits from the dive deck, as well as a bow exit around the front by the anchor chain.
From the dive deck, you can go down into the room behind the engine room, where everyone hangs their suits up when they're not being worn. There's also a clothes dryer, but it wasn't working while we were on board.
Forward of the dive deck is an extremely spacious galley, with three tables lining each side and a wide counter running down the middle where the food was served. They had quite a galley staff; 3 or 4 people on this trip. And the water was completely drinkable, something I was a little worried about.
From the galley, you can go down two ladders: one goes to the shower/sink area in the very front of the boat (2 curtained off shower areas, and a wide countertop with 2 sinks in it). The other goes down into the bunk room, which is directly beneath the galley. The double bunks are on the outside, with single bunks in stacks of three in the middle. The upper double bunks have about an extra foot of headroom, but are kind of hard to get into since there's nothing resembling a ladder. You just have to kind of heave yourself up, while trying to disturb the folks in the lower bunk as little as possible. For those of us who are short with poor upper arm strength, it's not the most fun and I have an interesting collection of bruises on my shins from hauling myself up there! At least the seas were fairly calm, so getting back OUT was never too dangerous.
I popped a drammamine just in case Wednesday night, and was out cold by 11pm or so. I woke up in the night when the engines started, and listened to them ramp up as we moved out of the harbor. Then the boat started rocking. Thankful for the medication, I was able to drift back to sleep again, and the next thing I knew it was daylight. (Though you have no way to know that from the bunk room; I just happened to get up to go to the bathroom the heads are up on the dive deck and noticed that people were already up and about!)
***THE DIVING***
We were headed out to San Miguel on day one, hopefully to have a go at Richardson's Rock, one of the sea mounts on the exposed side of the island. The group that had chartered the Vision for the weekend was Adventure Sports out of Santa Cruz, and was a group of pretty advanced divers, so we'd be trying to get to some of the deeper sites over the weekend.
The swell was small enough that we made it out there just fine, but it didn't look like very nice diving! Lots of wave-crashing action; that combined with the fact that it was a pretty deep dive (the top of the sea mount was around 90 feet), plus the fact that my medication was wearing off and I was starting to feel nauseous, made me start to think about skipping Dive #1. I was feeling like a total wimp, but those waves just did NOT look like fun.
Imagine my relief when the captain agreed! He decided there was just a little too much surge and swell going on, and headed over to Point Bennett (at the western tip of the island) instead.
This was much more my style! We went down to about 70 feet; it was a bit silty, but we saw lots of anemones and starfish, and some much fatter fish than I was used to! Also got buzzed repeatedly by sea lions, which is a new enough experience for me that it pretty much makes my day every time it happens.
Because of the aborted attempt at Richardson's, we got kind of a late start and it was just a three-dive day. We did our other two dives on the southwest side of the island: Judith Reef (lots of sunflower stars, super-surgey) and a site just north of Wychoff (sp?), which was just a shallow kelpy dive with lots of big rockfish, lingcod, and more sunflower stars.
No night dive Thursday night instead, we had Thanksgiving dinner, complete with pumpkin pie! Seriously; dinner was amazing better than plenty of Thanksgivings I've had at home!
By Friday (day 2), the swell was dying down a bit, so we headed out to Woodruff Pinnacle in the morning. This is another sea mount, with the top at about 80 feet. The anchor chain was draped over the top of the pinnacle, and then the anchor itself was down at about 170 feet. There's a near-vertical cliff on the southwest side, so it's basically a wall dive. We hung out at about 100 feet on our first dive, and saw lots of chestnut cowries and decorator crabs. Coming back up, the anchor line was crowded with divers, so we (stupidly) decided to go up without it. Actually, what was stupid was that we let ourselves lose sight of it! It didn't feel like there was a current, but by the time we surfaced we were pretty much at the end of the now-stretched-out, 300-yard current line. We tried to go back under and swim towards the boat, but when we surfaced again to see if we'd made any progress we hadn't! We finally grabbed the line and just hauled ourselves back in. Lesson learned: once you find the anchor line, keep it in sight!
On the upside, we spotted a nice comb jelly while we were floating around out there, the kind with the little flashy bits running up and down it's sides. Even got a semi-decent picture.
We had enough fun on the first dive that we decided to do it again, but the visibility had decreased and the surge was worse plus, the anchor line had slipped off the pinnacle. So we had to leave the line to FIND the pinnacle, and then, of course, could never find our way back. Once again, a long surface swim. This time we got to watch about a dozen decorator crabs scrambling over a scallop shell that a diver had left, but all in all, it was kind of a disappointing dive.
We decided to sit out dive #3 at Coral Cave in order to conserve energy for the 4th (shallower) dive of the day and hopefully a night dive. Another mistake, and from now one I will never skip a dive unless I actually don't feel up to it! Dive #4 of the day turned out to have 2 foot visibility, and almost everyone came back up as soon as they went in. By the time everyone was back on board, though, it was already dinnertime.
That night, I did my first night dive which was also my 50th dive! So I guess I'm an actual "intermediate" diver now, huh? I was really nervous about it; I thought I'd be creeped out and disoriented in the dark. It was nothing like I expected! We dove in Cuyler Harbor, with absolutely zero swell and only the tiniest amount of surge down around 35 feet. The anchor line was draped across a pile of rocks, so we could keep it nearly in sight the whole time but even without that, I never felt lost. It wasn't so different from a day dive; you can still see just as far, just not over such a wide area. It was incredibly tranquil poking around the reef in the dark! I love seeing fish snoozing on their sides! Jeff pissed off a couple of kelp crabs who came after him with snapping pincers, which was fun. I saw (or, more likely, just NOTICED) tons more anemones and starfish than I noticed in the daytime, and the colors seemed much more intense again, probably just because you have to shine your light directly on them!
We turned out our lights for a few moments on the bottom to play with the bioluminescence in the water, which looked totally weird to me. I thought bubbles were coming out of my fingertips; these little green dots went flying when I waved my hands around!
When we surfaced, our eyes were so adjusted to the dark that the stars positively POPPED! And we're from LA; we don't get to see stars that often. Absolutely beautiful; I couldn't wait to do it again!
Saturday day 3 was our shortest dive day, yet somehow we got the most dives in! At 7am, the gates opened at Boomerang Pinnacle, another deep sea mount. This one comes up slightly higher; we poked around between 65 and 84 feel. Spotted more chestnut cowries, crevice kelpfish, and more crabs, but it wasn't really any different from the dive the day before. Especially since once again, we couldn't find the anchor line, and once again, we drifted around with little jellyfish and other pelagic invertebrates for a while. Jeff got a picture of a cool cyclosalp, and we had a nice little paddle back to the boat!
The second and third dives of the day were the most fabulous, at Wilson's Rock. What a wonderful site! I could have spent the whole weekend there! The rocks break the surface, but we hung around down in about 45 feet of water for both dives. There were tons of sea lions zooming around us the whole time, and surfing the occasional breaker across the top of the rock (rare, since we actually had a totally flat ocean on Saturday!) We saw black-and-yellow rockfish, painted greenlings, and scared the HELL out of one cabezon when Jeff flashed his picture! I've never seen a fish zoom away so fast.
It was like a gigantic nudibranch nursery; we saw a bunch of teeny nudis that we hadn't spotted before (Catalina Triopha, White Dentronotid, Hermissenda Crassicornis, San Diego Dorid) as well as the ubiquitous sea lemon (or possibly "false sea lemon" who can tell?)
The sea lions were my favorite, though. They came super-close, and would play in front of us, nipping at each other, or zooming around while blowing bubbles.
Our last dive was back at Cuyler Harbor, to give the lobster hunters a chance. We saw dozens and dozens of sunflower stars, schools of black rockfish, lingcod, grass rockfish and about a gazillion urchins.
That's the trip in a nutshell! I'd definitely recommend the Vision to anyone; it was a great boat, with a wonderful crew. It probably helped that we had so many experienced divers on the trip; everyone was geared up and ready to go in no time at all at each dive site, and we got tons of photography pointers from others on board. And obviously, we lucked out on weather it sounds like the boat doesn't usually make it to San Miguel at all, much less the various pinnacles and sea mounts that we saw.
Now if only the water hadn't been 51 degrees, it really would have been perfect... all those dry suits that the northern californians were wearing looked really good to us by the end of the trip!
***THE BOAT***
We got to the Vision at about 8pm Wednesday night, and it was already starting to fill up! It was a bit disorganized, with no one obviously in charge, but we found a spot on deck for our bag (we consolidated into one to save space) and our tanks, and found our bunk downstairs.
Even in the dark, our first impressions of the boat were that it was a lot roomier than we were used to! The deck had lots of open space to gear up, with a wide platform in the center to put dive bags on. The tanks stand up along the sides of that platform; then there's a wide aisle between the rows of tanks and the outside rail, against which there are wide benches to help get suited up. There are port and starboard exits from the dive deck, as well as a bow exit around the front by the anchor chain.
From the dive deck, you can go down into the room behind the engine room, where everyone hangs their suits up when they're not being worn. There's also a clothes dryer, but it wasn't working while we were on board.
Forward of the dive deck is an extremely spacious galley, with three tables lining each side and a wide counter running down the middle where the food was served. They had quite a galley staff; 3 or 4 people on this trip. And the water was completely drinkable, something I was a little worried about.
From the galley, you can go down two ladders: one goes to the shower/sink area in the very front of the boat (2 curtained off shower areas, and a wide countertop with 2 sinks in it). The other goes down into the bunk room, which is directly beneath the galley. The double bunks are on the outside, with single bunks in stacks of three in the middle. The upper double bunks have about an extra foot of headroom, but are kind of hard to get into since there's nothing resembling a ladder. You just have to kind of heave yourself up, while trying to disturb the folks in the lower bunk as little as possible. For those of us who are short with poor upper arm strength, it's not the most fun and I have an interesting collection of bruises on my shins from hauling myself up there! At least the seas were fairly calm, so getting back OUT was never too dangerous.
I popped a drammamine just in case Wednesday night, and was out cold by 11pm or so. I woke up in the night when the engines started, and listened to them ramp up as we moved out of the harbor. Then the boat started rocking. Thankful for the medication, I was able to drift back to sleep again, and the next thing I knew it was daylight. (Though you have no way to know that from the bunk room; I just happened to get up to go to the bathroom the heads are up on the dive deck and noticed that people were already up and about!)
***THE DIVING***
We were headed out to San Miguel on day one, hopefully to have a go at Richardson's Rock, one of the sea mounts on the exposed side of the island. The group that had chartered the Vision for the weekend was Adventure Sports out of Santa Cruz, and was a group of pretty advanced divers, so we'd be trying to get to some of the deeper sites over the weekend.
The swell was small enough that we made it out there just fine, but it didn't look like very nice diving! Lots of wave-crashing action; that combined with the fact that it was a pretty deep dive (the top of the sea mount was around 90 feet), plus the fact that my medication was wearing off and I was starting to feel nauseous, made me start to think about skipping Dive #1. I was feeling like a total wimp, but those waves just did NOT look like fun.
Imagine my relief when the captain agreed! He decided there was just a little too much surge and swell going on, and headed over to Point Bennett (at the western tip of the island) instead.
This was much more my style! We went down to about 70 feet; it was a bit silty, but we saw lots of anemones and starfish, and some much fatter fish than I was used to! Also got buzzed repeatedly by sea lions, which is a new enough experience for me that it pretty much makes my day every time it happens.
Because of the aborted attempt at Richardson's, we got kind of a late start and it was just a three-dive day. We did our other two dives on the southwest side of the island: Judith Reef (lots of sunflower stars, super-surgey) and a site just north of Wychoff (sp?), which was just a shallow kelpy dive with lots of big rockfish, lingcod, and more sunflower stars.
No night dive Thursday night instead, we had Thanksgiving dinner, complete with pumpkin pie! Seriously; dinner was amazing better than plenty of Thanksgivings I've had at home!
By Friday (day 2), the swell was dying down a bit, so we headed out to Woodruff Pinnacle in the morning. This is another sea mount, with the top at about 80 feet. The anchor chain was draped over the top of the pinnacle, and then the anchor itself was down at about 170 feet. There's a near-vertical cliff on the southwest side, so it's basically a wall dive. We hung out at about 100 feet on our first dive, and saw lots of chestnut cowries and decorator crabs. Coming back up, the anchor line was crowded with divers, so we (stupidly) decided to go up without it. Actually, what was stupid was that we let ourselves lose sight of it! It didn't feel like there was a current, but by the time we surfaced we were pretty much at the end of the now-stretched-out, 300-yard current line. We tried to go back under and swim towards the boat, but when we surfaced again to see if we'd made any progress we hadn't! We finally grabbed the line and just hauled ourselves back in. Lesson learned: once you find the anchor line, keep it in sight!
On the upside, we spotted a nice comb jelly while we were floating around out there, the kind with the little flashy bits running up and down it's sides. Even got a semi-decent picture.
We had enough fun on the first dive that we decided to do it again, but the visibility had decreased and the surge was worse plus, the anchor line had slipped off the pinnacle. So we had to leave the line to FIND the pinnacle, and then, of course, could never find our way back. Once again, a long surface swim. This time we got to watch about a dozen decorator crabs scrambling over a scallop shell that a diver had left, but all in all, it was kind of a disappointing dive.
We decided to sit out dive #3 at Coral Cave in order to conserve energy for the 4th (shallower) dive of the day and hopefully a night dive. Another mistake, and from now one I will never skip a dive unless I actually don't feel up to it! Dive #4 of the day turned out to have 2 foot visibility, and almost everyone came back up as soon as they went in. By the time everyone was back on board, though, it was already dinnertime.
That night, I did my first night dive which was also my 50th dive! So I guess I'm an actual "intermediate" diver now, huh? I was really nervous about it; I thought I'd be creeped out and disoriented in the dark. It was nothing like I expected! We dove in Cuyler Harbor, with absolutely zero swell and only the tiniest amount of surge down around 35 feet. The anchor line was draped across a pile of rocks, so we could keep it nearly in sight the whole time but even without that, I never felt lost. It wasn't so different from a day dive; you can still see just as far, just not over such a wide area. It was incredibly tranquil poking around the reef in the dark! I love seeing fish snoozing on their sides! Jeff pissed off a couple of kelp crabs who came after him with snapping pincers, which was fun. I saw (or, more likely, just NOTICED) tons more anemones and starfish than I noticed in the daytime, and the colors seemed much more intense again, probably just because you have to shine your light directly on them!
We turned out our lights for a few moments on the bottom to play with the bioluminescence in the water, which looked totally weird to me. I thought bubbles were coming out of my fingertips; these little green dots went flying when I waved my hands around!
When we surfaced, our eyes were so adjusted to the dark that the stars positively POPPED! And we're from LA; we don't get to see stars that often. Absolutely beautiful; I couldn't wait to do it again!
Saturday day 3 was our shortest dive day, yet somehow we got the most dives in! At 7am, the gates opened at Boomerang Pinnacle, another deep sea mount. This one comes up slightly higher; we poked around between 65 and 84 feel. Spotted more chestnut cowries, crevice kelpfish, and more crabs, but it wasn't really any different from the dive the day before. Especially since once again, we couldn't find the anchor line, and once again, we drifted around with little jellyfish and other pelagic invertebrates for a while. Jeff got a picture of a cool cyclosalp, and we had a nice little paddle back to the boat!
The second and third dives of the day were the most fabulous, at Wilson's Rock. What a wonderful site! I could have spent the whole weekend there! The rocks break the surface, but we hung around down in about 45 feet of water for both dives. There were tons of sea lions zooming around us the whole time, and surfing the occasional breaker across the top of the rock (rare, since we actually had a totally flat ocean on Saturday!) We saw black-and-yellow rockfish, painted greenlings, and scared the HELL out of one cabezon when Jeff flashed his picture! I've never seen a fish zoom away so fast.
It was like a gigantic nudibranch nursery; we saw a bunch of teeny nudis that we hadn't spotted before (Catalina Triopha, White Dentronotid, Hermissenda Crassicornis, San Diego Dorid) as well as the ubiquitous sea lemon (or possibly "false sea lemon" who can tell?)
The sea lions were my favorite, though. They came super-close, and would play in front of us, nipping at each other, or zooming around while blowing bubbles.
Our last dive was back at Cuyler Harbor, to give the lobster hunters a chance. We saw dozens and dozens of sunflower stars, schools of black rockfish, lingcod, grass rockfish and about a gazillion urchins.
That's the trip in a nutshell! I'd definitely recommend the Vision to anyone; it was a great boat, with a wonderful crew. It probably helped that we had so many experienced divers on the trip; everyone was geared up and ready to go in no time at all at each dive site, and we got tons of photography pointers from others on board. And obviously, we lucked out on weather it sounds like the boat doesn't usually make it to San Miguel at all, much less the various pinnacles and sea mounts that we saw.
Now if only the water hadn't been 51 degrees, it really would have been perfect... all those dry suits that the northern californians were wearing looked really good to us by the end of the trip!
Well, except for the SC sweatshirt on your hubby... nice report and pics!
