Deep sea diving

We did 4 deep dives this weekend. The goal is to learn to do deep diving in controlled conditions and make sure you know how you react to nitrogen narcosis - a sort of "I'm drunk!" feeling many people get when they go below 100ft.

Lucky for us - the water was perfect for diving this weekend. No waves, no swell, and 30-80' visibility. Incredible!

Saturday we anchored at Ballbuster. This site has a nice description of how Ballbuster got its name, and some good pictures from that spot: http://www.coldwaterimages.com/ballbuster.html

We went down to 130ft and swam along the bottom for about 10 minutes. There were a bunch of metridiums (the large white anemones you can see in the pictures in the above link). We also saw quite a few fish and very large crabs. I'm always excited to see crabs, and once again Curtis was doing a good job of finding them for me. :)

When it was time to go up, we carefully and slowly ascended, doing a one minute stop at 40 feet in addition to our 3 minute safety stop at 15 feet. No problem!

There was just one hitch - as I was climbing the ladder back into the boat, my weight belt slipped off, and I watched in that 80' visibility as it sank, sank, right out of sight. Sigh. We put out a drop line and made a plan to dive the same spot for the second dive and see if we could retrieve the weightbelt. Luckily there was enough extra weight on board that I could still do the second dive, by just using the weight pockets in my BCD.

Luckily, on the second dive the weight belt was found. Just when we thought they was no way, and it was almost time to start ascending. Meanwhile, Curtis noticed that one of the other diver's tanks had come loose from his BCD and was just floating along behind him. Grrrr. Curtis tried to help, but it turns out its really hard to fix something like that in the water - better just to ascend carefully and make sure the tank and diver stay together. In all the action, we lost track of the fact that there was a descent amount of current and we weren't holding the anchor line. We started drifting as we ascended and three of us ended a fair distance from the boat. A long swim against the current to end the dive is a good way to use up that remaining energy. Sooooo tired afterwords. But it was a good dive to do a retrospective on - what went wrong and what could we have done better.

Came home and slept for 9 hours. Because guess what? Sunday we had to do the same thing again!


Sunday we were at the Great Pinnacle in Point Lobos State Reserve. Now that we had mastered the basics of deep diving, the plan was to go down to 120' for just a couple minutes, and then come up to about 60' where we could do a fun dive around the pinnacle without having such a short bottom time. (The deeper you go, the faster your air runs out, among other things).

The great pinnacle was amazing. There were 'Southern Sea Palms' growing all along the upper part of the pinnacle, huge carpets of red and orange cub coral, they looked like a candy holiday. Large lemon nudibranchs, so numerous I named it the 'Nudibranch petting zoo'. We saw a couple super lazy ling code, just stretched out and laying on the bottom. You could look right into their faces and they'd just look right back, never flinching a fin. We saw a huge greenling - they are really pretty with their brilliant reds and blues. We also saw some small greenlings camouflaged amongst the cup coral. Then there were the Sheepheads. Three of them. Only one came close - he'd lazily swim up, sort of tilt on his side to get a better look at us, then slowly swim away again.

No mishaps on either of Sunday's dives, so it was a very good day. Ending in rain, falling heavier and heavier. Definitely time to pack up and head for some good hot lunch!