Dive Report 7.31.12 – Addicted to the Shallows

Marine Room, La Jolla California

Evening dive with Tim, Kimo, and Rachel at the Marine Room. I was super excited to get in the water after seeing my friend Ashley Hauck’s photo blog on snorkeling the shallows today. It looked so clear and awesome! She got some great shots of the leopard sharks, guitar fish, and bat rays. Go check it out! It was a flat surf day at the Marine Room. Not often that happens. We had a super calm kick out, with only one or two complaints of the long surface swim. Those complaints were adequately made fun of, being this person had his scooter with him…. 😀 He was just antsy to get underwater, as were the rest of us, but we were trying to avoid a long sand swim. We drop down and viz wise we had pockets of 10-15 feet. Surge was light to moderate but there was a ton of life out. The next hour and half, yes that’s right. HOUR AND A HALF was a blissful dive of cruising around, peering in grass beds, checking out the nooks and crannies of all the rock piles. Just like the cove, my dive buddies generally found me upside down, with my camera shoved under a rock. I feel upside down underwater photography is quite an effective and essential method to avoid killing things you could hit or kick horizontally. 😀 And apparently I entertain others when I do it. 😀 Among the fish schools swimming around us and the kelp fish trying to hide, was banded guitarfish, horn sharks, tons of lobsters, a moray eel (I missed that but hopefully Tim got the footage!), huge bass, a scorpion fish, bat rays, stings ray, and of course two soupfin shark sightings which I missed because I was upside down under some rock. haha

So as miss Rachel so accurately put it : “If scuba were an Olympic sport we would definitely win GOLD. Minus 7/10’s of a point to Jami for not spotting the 5ft shark.” 😀 Great dive today!

Max Depth: 22 feet
Temp:  60 degrees
Viz – 10-15 feet
Current: light
Surge: light- moderate
Bottom Time: 94 min

Eye Candy: Soupfin sharks (for everyone but me, lol), horn sharks, kelp fish, calicos, sand bass, sheepshead, senorita fish, guitarfish, scorpion fish, bat rays, sting rays, spiny lobsters, and halibut