OK, here's a brief summary of the Channel Islands weekend on Truth over 3/8-9. More to come on my blog later when I have time. Here's Anne just before we descended onto Underwater Island, south Anacapa on sunday, a truly stunning dive.
more photos at:
channel_islands_march_08 Photo Gallery by Jeff Dooley at pbase.com
First the good news: Sunny and warm conditions with mostly flat seas, and best of all, there were less than 15 divers signed up for the trip. Truth is a little smaller boat than Vision or Conception, and having such a small number of divers made it feel like a private charter.
So so news: vis was generally the worst I've seen on the Channel Islands. Saturday on Santa Cruz we were getting no better than 20' and the next day on Anacapa, despite the stunning sites we visited, vis was maybe 40' at best. for instance, at Coral Reef, which we got to for the last dive Sunday after the current died down a bit, you could'nt see down the broad canyons to the south and west, but you could see to the 100' sand bottom off the south wall from about 40' on the wall.
Still incredibly colorful and varied terrain, sometimes rocky festooned with inverts, sometimes smooth and sloping and covered with a blanket of brittle stars.
Short version: OK on Saturday, phenomenal, despite marginal vis, on Sunday.
The best dive of the weekend was our second dive off the south of Anacapa just east of Coral Reef, a site called Underwater Island. This is where all the photos in the link above were taken. This site is an outcropping of rock in the form of a couple of very long (north-south) rock dikes rising out of about 60' up to about 20' at the tops. Along the east side of the main rock was a vertical wall running almost its entire length, with lots of little caves and holes and the most crowded festival of life all over the rock surfaces that I've ever seen. Corynactus, yellow sponges, spanish shawls, gorgonians, with lots of sea hares, limpets, cucumbers, and brittle stars everywhere around the bases of the rocks and up the little draws. Garibaldi were everywhere, along with treefish, and greenlings. We saw a big ling Cod sitting on a rock but as i turned to take a pic it wriggled away in a cloud of silt.
Earlier, at Deep Goldfish Bowl near the west end of Anacapa, where Anne and I had tagged along with the AOW deep divers, a harbor seal came up to us as we swam side by side and did corkscrew figure eights right in front of us for about 15 seconds before swimming right at me and veering off and away.
The small group on the boat was mainly customers, students, and an instructor from Pinnacles Dive Center in Novato/Santa Rosa. Most of us had at least met everyone else durint the week prior or during classes over the past few weeks. The agenda for the weekend included both OW completions and AOW, so it was very busy.
I managed 4 dives per day, though I elected to pass on the night dive at Blue Banks on Santa Cruz because I didn't like either the site or the conditions. It was on a relatively exposed point with the anchor off to the west in a direction likely to pick up current, and there was a brisk wind kicking up about a 2' wind chop. About a half dozen people did the dive and it was no problem, but I had a lot of fun opening beers while they were down there.
Another really great thing about this weekend was that Anne and I brought our own coffee.
Oh, and here's a pretty comical video of me cluelessly complaining about my camera after unwittingly switching it to the movie setting and being irritated that the strobe wouldn't go off.
YouTube - Channel islands Anacapa entry
Not the best, and the soundtrack isn't my favorite (although it works, in a weird way). I'll have my report and photos later, probably Monday.
