"It's a desert down there"

[LCF]

So, this morning, Peter and I had a wild hair and decided, on the spur of the moment, to throw our gear in the truck and head down to Redondo. Peter hadn't done a fun dive in quite a while, and I hadn't done a macro photo dive, so we were going to have fun.

We pulled into the parking lot, and there were a couple of classes going on. One I think was an AOW, but I'm not totally sure -- it was a class, and the instructor didn't know the student's gear well, so it wasn't OW. At any rate, I got to chatting with the student, who told me he was disappointed not to find a bunch of Dungeness crabs at the site. In fact, he said there wasn't much to see, and that from his viewpoint, "It's pretty much a desert down there."

So Peter and I geared up and got in the water. Viz was pretty uniformly bad, in the "can light only at ten feet" range, but we managed to find enough to look at to spend 50 minutes in the water (and it probably would have been more, had the lousy viz not caused a signal confusion, where I thought Peter was saying, "Let's get out of here," and Peter thought he was asking, "Do you want to get out of here?"). It was a desert all right:


Graceful cancer crabs caught in flagrante


My first gruntie in a while


Little red octo


Maybe a rock sole?


Roughback sculpin -- we saw a lot of these guys


Slime star hunting something


Small buffalo sculpin


TONS of spot prawns

We also saw pygmy poachers, of which I got several photos but none good enough to share, as well as several other sorts of flatfish. Blackbellies eelpouts were everywhere deep, and snake pricklebacks wouldn't sit still long enough for a picture. Blackeyed hermit crabs were vying for shells, and I actually got a photo of a horned shrimp, but you can't tell what it is from the picture :( We saw striped perch and tubesnouts, as well as swimming anemones and of course metridiums, and a few rockfish, mostly coppers.

It's a desert down there, to be sure!

[Jeremy]

I remember thinking the same thing about Mukilteo when I first started diving...

[Linedog]

I'm still learning to slow down and smell the roses.

[LCF]

Slowing down is a big part of it. So is learning more about the critters, so that you know where to look for them, and how to "see" them when they are there. Good lights help -- without lights, we wouldn't have seen squat today, because it was blacker than the inside of a cat below about 40 feet.

And being INTERESTED in what you do find helps a ton . . . My dear friend Ben Messinger says, "You will never have a bad dive in Puget Sound, if you look at what's there, and not what isn't." And there is a ton of truth to that. If you aren't happy without GPOs and wolf eels, you're going to have a lot of frustrated dives. If totting up how many species of sculpin you can find on one dive floats your boat, you're going to have a LOT of happy time underwater!

[Tom Nic]

Nice.

Love the desert!

[RVbldr]

Was thinking the same thing on Thursday evening...I could have spent the whole dive around just one of the boats taking shots of all the different small critters.

[Dusty2]

The desert is a very active place if you know where to look.

[dwashbur]

I believe your buffalo sculpin may actually be a great sculpin. We were at Redondo yesterday morning and while the viz was horrible, we had a good time and found some nice critters. Redondo delivers. That's one you can take to the bank.

[Greg Jensen]

The sculpin is a padded. The seastar is a sand star (Luidia), not a slime star (Pteraster) which are very fat with short arms.
The flatfish looks like an English sole.

[mpenders]

I was at Redondo this afternoon with my son, Ryan, completing his final two checkout dives.

Viz was not stellar, especially considering the numerous students that were coming out of the water as we were going in. The "desert" only produced 4 GPO's in dens, 2 Red Octo's out in the open, several white lined dirona's, brittle stars, and tons of hooded nudibranch's...to name just a few of the critters we encountered.

It helped that he's seen many of my pictures, and has been eagerly awaiting his own opportunity to see all that our waters hold. He also had the benefit of a private tour guide - showing him how much can be found when you go slow, think small and take your time to look around.

[LCF]

Thanks, Greg! The starfish was just a brainf*** because I know better, but I still bat about .250 on the sculpins, despite referring to your e-book!

[dwashbur]

I stand corrected. I only just saw the cirrus at the corner of its mouth.

Despite the viz, I managed to find a couple of nice snake pricklebacks out in the open. That was a bit of a treat since they're usually nocturnal.

[ArcticDiver]

I'm still learning to slow down and smell the roses.

Memories:

Bahamas liveaboard. Everyone else on board came as one of a couple groups. I'm at least 30 years older than the rest of the divers. Pool's open. Splash and everyone but me races off into the ?????. I swim about 50 yards from the boat. There lying in a small crevice is a green eel that is longer by far than me. Biggest eel I had ever seen. I hover nearby while the rest of the divers vanish in the distance. Then I swim away and leave the eel some peace.

Lots of other small things to see.

After the dive everyone was talking about how disappointing the dive was. No one saw anything worth seeing.

Me? I just rinsed off and kept my peace.

I'm a real klutz shore diving because I don't do much of it. But, off a boat....... That boat shadow is gold.

[Dive Monkey]

You can stay in one spot,any spot and stare at the bottom. If you stay there long enough something is going to move!

[ArcticDiver]

You can stay in one spot,any spot and stare at the bottom. If you stay there long enough something is going to move!

You only say that because you dive in the Ring of Fire.