San Diego - Point Loma 8/4/2007

I had to head out to San Diego for the jobby job and we decided to leave early on a Friday to try our first West Coast dive. Visions of kelp forests dancing in our heads.

We hooked up with Dive Connections Inc at the West Mission Bay Marina - http://www.gottadive.com/. Mark (el Capitan) and Ryan (Divemaster) took us out to "Three Fingers" off of Point Loma for the first tank. From dock to anchor is was about 40 minutes of calm seas and half throttled engines.

We brought our regs and computers, but for everything else we geared up with DCI's rental equipment. Terrific brand new stuff. Highly recommend renting from them.

After a short briefing about the likelyhood of low vis we descended to about 55'. The first 30 ft was terrible vis. You could hardly see your own fins.

DIVE 1: POINT LOMA -THREE FINGERS

Water temp: 59 °F

Max Depth: 65'

Visibility: 10-15'
Bottom time: 41 min

Tank: Aluminium/ Air

I was a little nervouse on this dive since I was taking a new Canon point and shoot camera down for the first time (i.e. Canon SD800 IS w/ Canon UW case WP-DC9).

So in mind I kept repeating "please be sealed well, please be sealed well." I snagged a sea cucumber with the first underwater shot from this little magic box.

The first thing you will notice about the San Diego coast is the abundance of starfish and cucumbers. The starfish were a whole new lesson in sea life for us. They are plentiful and appear very healthy and fat. There apeared to be 8-10 different species of varying sizes. Apparantley stars, cucumbers and sea urchins play nice together. It was not unusual to see all three within a square foot of each other.

At 10-15 from the bottom the visibilty got a little better and now that I had a little confidence in the watertightness of this camera case.

Giant Sea Star

Sea lemon nudibranch (Archidoris montereyensis) ???

DIVE 2: POINT LOMA KELP FOREST

Water temp: 59 °F

Max Depth: 50'

Visibility: 10-15'
Bottom time: 47 min

Tank: Aluminium/ Air

Dive two was a 20 minute ride away. The surface was spotted by kelp leaves. And that is what we dove down into.



The kelp is a strange experience but we didn't find it diffucult navigate. Although there are think patches there are also many clear areas to hang out in. The color in the photos popped muc more than they did in plain view. These are macro with flash and the leaves and bulbs came out as bright orange/yellow, but in person they were a pale orange.



We also met a little friend who goes into attack mode even though we came in peace.