The water is clear, very clear, with visibility of about twenty-five meters. The first thing that strikes you is that giant kelp is well, umm, giant. I guess the name should have given it away but it really is giant. It also makes navigation of the dive site a bit tricky, as it’s like diving though a forest. It also has a knack of finding any dangling bit of kit and wrapping itself around the offending article, then as you swim away, you are slowly aware that swimming is getting harder and harder until all forward motion is stopped. With luck you can untangle yourself, or just sit there pathetically and wait for your buddy, who is bound to miss you sooner or later, …..maybe.
With Giant Kelp everywhere we used it as a living shot line, the seabed was a slope of small rocks starting at six meters and descending to a sandy floor at about twenty. Darting amongst the kelp were Californian sheephead wrasse who are very protective of their territory, suddenly darting out of the kelp and stopping inches from your mask and just staying there, until that is, the photographers amongst us raised our cameras, then they would disappear as quickly as they arrived. Far keener to be photographed were Garibaldi, which are a signature fish of the Channel Islands . Garibaldi are the largest of the damsel fish family, growing to a size of fourteen inches. They are closely related to the aggressive anemone fish we’re used to from the Red Sea , just as bold but a whole lot bigger, and a lot more orange. Again they are very territorial, making sure they see you off their territory.
A lot shyer are Black eye Gobies that dart away as soon as they see you, but keep a beady eye on you from the safety of a crevice. As with any dive site it is worth having a poke around in crevices, lurking in many are Spiny Lobsters, which are more like crayfish than the large clawed lobsters that we know from UK waters. (And just as tasty, as we were later to find out.)
After about fifty minutes we congratulated ourselves in managing to navigate back under the boat. Unlike most UK operations the US nearly always anchor the boat and expect you to make it back to the boat after the dive. As there were about thirty convenient shot lines in the form of Giant Kelp reaching for the suffice we ascended one of theses rather than use a DSMB which would just be a liability. However, at about six meters the curse of the aluminium tanks struck, very slowly but at the same time out of control we started to drift upwards, we managed to slow our ascent by hanging on to the plant. More weight next dive.
Having messed up the kitting up, entry and dive part of the briefing, we had at least nailed the final part of the briefing, getting back to the boat and out of the water. Well, we managed to exit the water with not even a shred of dignity left, the last six foot of the King Neptune is a dive platform at about one inch under the water, which is made of cheese graters. To get into the boat you had to launch yourself out of the water magically get to your feet and step into boat, nobody ever did this with anything resembling style at all. For a dive boat that was almost perfect the last six foot needed some serious thought.
We did three dives on that first day, all of the time exploring different reefs, some with lots of kelp, others with bare sandy patches covered in shoals of fish, it was on the last dive that our navigation let us down. On surfacing, the boat was not the expected fifty meter surface swim, more like five hundred. Having realized that the boat was not going to come to us, and wondering just how bad our navigation was we started the long long swim back. After about five minutes the boat seemed no nearer, so head down and more swimming, look up and boat was closer but still a way away. Head down and more swimming, suddenly there is the boat on top of us. We were glad we did not have to swim all the way and the boat came to pick us up, it turned out the anchor was dragging and our navigation was spot on, we surfaced where the boat should have been. The skipper and crew were worried about picking up divers using a live boat, as most American divers are just not used to seeing a boat motor up to them and behave in strange ways, to us it was just a relief after our long swim.
We spent the evening exploring the small seaside town of Avalon, which took about five minutes as the place was tiny, tiny but perfectly formed. Out of all the places I have visited in the US this was the most pedestrian friendly I have ever seen, there were hardly any cars on the streets, instead the residents zipped around on golf carts. We all had dinner as a large group in a restaurant famed for its sea food, and it’s life size replicas of Marlin and other sport fishes hanging from the walls. We were all impressed by the sheer size and presence of these large predators, as we celebrated Alan Knox’s five hundredth dive underneath them.
The first dive the next day was to be on large pinnacle starting in about fifteen meters of water and going down to about forty-five at the base, as the dive site is quite compact my buddy and I were keen to be the first down the shot line hoping to complete most of the dive before any other buddy teams got into the water. Descending the shot line I expected the pinnacle to come into view at about ten meters, by the time we got to twenty I knew we had missed the pinnacle, being in an optimistic mood we continued down the anchor line.
Reaching the bottom at thirty-five meters we really knew we had blown it, but carried on following the drag marks made by the anchor up a slight slope. We found nothing vaguely resembling a pinnacle, even rocks were in short supply as the seabed was mostly made up of sand and golf balls. Narked, narked out of my head, if I thought the sea bed was made up of golf balls, I must have been diving far to long on nitrox if I am that bad on air at thirty-five meters. To prove to myself how narked I was I decided to take a close look at these ‘golf balls’ to find out what they really were, and they turned out to be golf balls, the seabed was covered with them.
Because of the sandy sea bed and the depth the giant kelp was absent from this dive, instead grew a strange tree like sea weed with a few big leaves that stuck out horizontally and a single giant air sack the size of a foot ball. The seaweed trees growing out of a golf ball seabed gave a feeling of diving in the mind of Salvador Dali. We aborted the dive after ten minutes so we could have a second dive on the pinnacle.
On our surface interval we were lucky enough to see an Ocean Sunfish basking on the surface, a bit later we saw some large fish leaping out of the water and acting like bait fish with something chasing them, seconds later a large Blue Marlin was briefly seen snatching a fish from the surface. Excited by what we had seen on the surface we jumped back in again as soon as the skipper had repositioned the boat.
This time the anchor line was spot on, we could see the pinnacle from the surface and it was covered with fish. No sooner had we reached the end of the anchor line when we were buzzed by a female Californian Sea Lion, sadly it was gone before I even had a chance to switch on the camera. One of the crew was lobster hunting and he beckoned us over and showed us a very large Sheep Crab almost at the base of the pinnacle. The crab looked very like the spider crabs we find off the south coast but larger at almost a meter across, deciding to push my luck a bit I nervously descend to its level to take a couple of pictures, my camera housing is rated to thirty meters and the crab was at forty, however the camera behaved perfectly but I don’t think I will be going any deeper with it. Ascending slowly we circled the pinnacle a few times before leaving the bottom with a few minutes of deco accumulated, as I had plenty of air left I decided to do the deco stops at fifteen meters as at around this depth I was surrounded with schools of fish, I was hoping to see a large predator like a Blue Marlin passing by, sadly this did not happen.