TWARS (This Week at Reef Seekers) - July 17-24

[Ken Kurtis]

Swell, Zoom Seekers, rare lobster, and more (please scroll down for details)​

There's a water change on the way . . . WATCH OUT FOR THE BIG SWELL - Looks like Tuesday may be the biggest day. (Good for surfers, bad for divers.) There are two storms to be looking at. One is down around New Zealand which will drive the surf that's expected to start building Monday and looks like it will peak on Tuesday. The other is Hurricane Estelle, which will move through the Socorro Islands Monday/Tuesday and whose waves will probably arrive by the weekend. The New Zealand storm should have waves coming out of the SW which means it will hit a number of SoCal beaches. (The ones from Estelle should be much more southerly.) If you look at the projected surf image below from Surfer.com (blue is good/low, green is bad/high), you can see how this will travel and you can also see how Catalina and, to some degree, San Clemente, throw a "shadow" that blocks the wave action from hitting certain areas, or at least helps minimize it. Looks like Orange County will be the most directly hit. If you've got shore diving planned for this week at any of our local beaches, double-check conditions before you go down.​

AVALON ON WEDNESDAY - I don't think, looking at this map, that the swell will have an effect on our planned Wednesday Avalon trip. We've still got two spots left if anyone's interested. (I have to turn them back in late Monday afternoon if no one wants them.) We're leaving on the 7:30AM boat out of San Pedro, and will return on the 6PM boat from Avalon. We'll easily have time for three dives in the U/W Park (many Giant Sea Bass sightings lately) and we may even have time to squeeze in 18 holes of miniature golf. $175 gets you covered for boat, taxi, tanks and airfills (golf is extra). We usually take a break between dives 2 and 3 for lunch (which we bring). It should be a lovely day with air temps in the high 70s and water temps maybe even as high as 71º. Call us at 310/652-4990 if you want to get in on the fun. NICE HAT - There's a newly-discovered crab in Australia who wears a sponge as a hat. Crabs using sponges or debris to help camouflage themselves is not unusual but this new guy is also quite hairy or "fluffy." And this discovery also underscores the role citizen scientists play. The crab was discovered washed up on a beach by a family who thought it looked odd and sent it off to a museum for identification. You can read more about this - and see a pix of Mr. Fluffy - here (thanks to Skip Abelson for the tip): FLUFFY AUSTRALIAN CRAB. ZOOM SEEKERS FROM LAST WEEK - We had some technical problems to overcome, but we ended up with a very interesting Zoom Seekers talk last Tuesday from Kurt Lieber, founder and president of Ocean Defenders Alliance, whose overall goal is to clean up the ocean. Since we had trouble with Kurt's video playing, we turned this chat more into a back-and-forth interview between the two of us, plus we were able to lift videos off of the ODA website to illustrate the issues we were discussing. In you missed all of this, you can watch it here at your leisure: ZOOM SEEKERS - KURT LIEBER - OCEAN DEFENDERS ALLIANCE. ORANGE LOBSTER SAVED - You've got to wonder how many hands this lobster passed through before someone said, "Wait a minute, this guy's unusual." But a very rare orange lobster has been saved from the dinner plate. He was in a shipment of lobsters to a . . . not a joke . . . Red Lobster restaurant in Florida. Someone at the restaurant realized that he was rare and they contacted an aquarium who sent someone down to pick up the crustacean. But this coloration really is rare. Blue lobsters are roughly 1 in a million. Orange lobsters are thought to be 1 in 30 million. You can read more about it here: ORANGE LOBSTER SAVED. And that'll do it for now. Have a great week and let's go diving soon!!! - Ken​