Diving in Monterey

Yesterday I got to finally get in the water for a dive completely unrelated to work and it was a lot of fun!  I went with a guy that is from Zurich, Switzerland who is over here for a few weeks to work with us in the seahorse gallery and learn a thing or two about what we do.  He's a bit frustrating to work with at times because he doesn't really understand what it means to have 100 different things to do and thinks we should all just be focusing on one particular aspect of the job and do that really well; if only it were that easy!

Anyway, we decided to get in the water off of Cannery Row just down the street from work.  There is a beach called McAbee beach behind the Mexican restaurant El Torito.  So after we got his gear rented and I got a tank we hit the beach.  It was a nice, sunny day when we got in the water but it was kinda windy.  The waves were coming in strong but not nearly as big as the ones over by Lover's Point where we first thought about going.  Once we got in we headed south-southwest along the rocks on the right then cut over south-southeast and came back north to finish our dive.

It was extremely surgey underwater and we were getting tossed around, back and forth a good 15-feet at a time and with visibility of maybe 10-12 feet in 52 degrees you'd think this would have been a horrible dive but it wasn't.  I needed to get out of the house and do something, pretty much anything that wasn't work related and since I can't run, not completely into biking yet, and I stopped drinking this seemed to be the perfect outlet!!!  And I didn't care that I was getting flung around like a ragdoll underwater I was enjoying every minute of it.  The sun was still shining through the detritus, sand and kelp and the fish were still swimming.  We saw a bunch of rockfish, a couple of monkey face eels, a bunch of inverts and even a school of about 100 or so tubesnouts!

Overall a great dive...we were down for about 65 minutes and hopefully I'll get back in the water again soon!

LIG!