"It's a desert down there"
Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2013 7:41 pm
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!
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!