Marine Room Night Dive – La Jolla Shores
I’m finally back in the water on a weekly basis! My eyes have healed nicely and while they are still adjusting at times, I can already tell they make a world of difference underwater. I swear I’m seeing so much more tiny things that I never noticed before!
Monday night I head out to the Marine Room in La Jolla for a night dive with my two good friends, Bethy and Kimo. It was a beautiful night for a dive. No wind. Maybe two foot waves at the most, and an easy entry. We drop down in slop though. Completely murky with sand billowing from the current. The current easily pushed along to our depth where the ocean cleared up to a wonderful 30-40 foot viz. We happily poked along through the sand taking photos and video. The current pulled us north at this point so we missed the canyon (oops) but still found so much life to take footage of!
Max Depth: 78 feet
Temp: 49 degrees (burrrr, thanks for the wetsuit warmer Kimo!)
Viz – 3-5 feet in the shallows, 30-40 feet at depth
Current: Strong current pulling us west and sometimes north
Bottom Time: 59 min
Eye Candy:
Adult and juvenile horn sharks, scorpion fish, nudibranchs, spiny lobsters, swimming crabs, a school of pipe fish, ronquils, pygmy’s, red octopus, staghorn sculpin, flat fish,
As we started to head back we then started to noticed just how strong the current was that so easily pushed us out to our dive spot. We surfaced to get a gauge on where we were and were still quite a distance off from the shore even though we were in pretty shallow waters. We decided to do a surface swim in so we could talked excitedly about our dive and what we saw. Then we noticed we weren’t moving… I stopped kicking and almost immediately was 15 feet from my buddy heading the opposite direction back into the ocean. Time to make a decision and fast. We both had enough air to drop back down. Luckily we were able to easily swim under the current, I was dreading the thought of having to to claw my way back to shore. Once my computer read that we were at a 5 ft depth we surfaced. Phew. They don’t say rule of thirds for air in diving for nothing! Dive safe! 🙂
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