After helping Bruce Saturday with an Open Water class at Breakwater I really wanted to take advantage of my day off before Thanksgiving and get in a dive.
Ended up with Bruce and Clara at Point Lobos and we had planned to do a dive to Beto’s Reef. We had a technical problem that delayed us a bit while we swapped tanks around but we eventually all made it in together.
Dive #1: We did a long surface swim out to Bird Rock and dropped there pretty much 15 feet off the side of it. Swam somewhere around 30 degrees if I remember correctly and swam out to and past sea mount (which is cool and I’d like to see it again). From there it only felt like a few minutes until we were all at Beto’s Reef. All I can say is WOW. Having never been there before, that site is amazing. The size of the walls, the amount of hydrocoral and big fish (saw a lingzilla), to sponges and other soft corals was unlike any Carmel site I had seen before. Being that we were all on HP 100′s we really only made one pass down what seemed to be the NW side and once we reached the tip we made a turn back towards the cove. On the way back in we hit a 1-3 minute (depending on who) decompression obligation. However, this cleared well before we even made it above 40fsw, so we didn’t have to have any extra stops (aside from my normal deep/safety stops). We ended up swimming in a long way into the cove before surfacing and came up just slightly before the ramp. One of if not my favorite dive to date, big thanks to Bruce for yet again amazing Nav. at Lobos.
Dive #121: 118fsw max for 49 minutes. Varying vis, 20-25 feet. Diving EAN32 on single HP 100′s.
Dive #2: For our second dive Clara was a little cold (she dives a wetsuit) so we decided on a more leisurely dive zig zagging back and forward through Middle Reef. There was a little surge, but it was a great dive, theres so much more to Middle Reef especially the outer parts than you realize. Was a nice relaxing dive that ended up with us coming up right at the ramp.
Dive #122: 72fsw max for 60 minutes. Varying vis, 15-20-25 feet. Diving EAN32 on single HP 100′s.
