La Jolla, California – The Marine Room
Dive #260
SD Hammerhead meetup! We bumped up the dive from 8AM to 7AM due to finding out the La Jolla half marathon and 5K were routed right through Spindrift and the entrance to the Marine Room. High five to you rock stars willing to get up earlier! The goal was to head to the Marine Room shallows in search for….wait for it…. you guessed it, SHARKS. I know you are completely and utterly shocked I’m still looking for more sharks. 😀 I thought because the Cove still had decent conditions, it would be an excellent day for the Marine Room shallows. I was wrong. 5-10 feet of viz and strong surge. Boo. We did get separated because of the lack of visibility and after meeting back at the surface, we found one of the divers had a reg problem. To be safe, he called his dive and I swam in with him just in case. The rest of the divers continued on and from what they reported back to me, had an awesome dive! Jeremy and Ben found better viz deeper and played with a feisty sheep crab and sarcastic fringehead. They also came across a chunky monkey of a halibut!! Nice finds guys!! And then Fred, Betty, and Jovan stuck it out in the shallows in hopes of shark sightings… and they were not disappointed! Fred told me he was straining through the viz in hopes of seeing one, and then one comes out of nowhere 3 feet away from him! Jovan and Betty luckily saw it too in the few seconds he stuck around. Here is Fred’s video:
I am STOKED for them. It was Fred and Jovan’s first shark sighting! And being dive buddies of mine, I’m pretty sure they thought I was definitely shark repellent. LOL Then Jovan, being the nudibranch whisperer that he is, of course spots the tiniest Hopkin’s Rose, which from I understand, isn’t seen very often here. Betty got a great shot of it:
Goes to show, less than perfect conditions doesn’t always mean its going to be a bad dive! 😀
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