It can’t be a surprise to anyone who knows us that our usual birthday celebrations involve diving. Jeff’s November birthday lends itself well to 3-day trips on the Vision. My June birthday usually means a couple of days in Catalina. This year we splurged: three days in Catalina.

We took the last ferry out Thursday night so that we’d be able to spend Friday diving at Casino Point, and beat the weekend crowds. Usually we stay at the Atwater, which is right in town, but this time we tried out a new place: Seaport Village Inn. The main draw was gear shuttle service to and from the dive park. We used to just haul the gear there ourselves, but now that we’re sporting drysuits and two cameras, there’s just no way! The shuttle – actually a small golf cart – often resulted in a bit of waiting and repeated calls to the desk, but it saved us money on cabs.

Friday morning we hit the park at high tide and had ourselves three lovely, dry, warm and toasty dives.

The water wasn’t the clearest – it was full of what I’ve heard some divers call “whale snot,” and what Jeff refers to as “egg drop soup.” In the summer, the algae blooms and all kinds of things start growing and spawning, so if you think too hard about what you’re swimming through you might get grossed out.

We still enjoyed ourselves, with trips to the various wrecks in the park and plenty of oddball fish behavior to amuse us.

Male sheephead battle it out:

The other highlight of the day – and I don’t know why we didn’t take a picture – was seeing the T-shirts sported by a Christian dive club at the point: “He died for us… We dive for him.”

I don’t know if I’d put scuba diving up there with getting crucified, in terms of sacrifices one could make. The dive club was full of perfectly nice folks – a bunch of them were on the boat with us Saturday – but I just couldn’t stop mocking them inside my head because of the shirts. I’m going straight to hell.

Saturday we dove on the King Neptune with 16 Christians (mostly new divers), 2 guys from Northern California, and Dr. Bill. The divemasters let us heathens skip the briefings so we could beat the crowd into the water on all three dives, which was nice. On our first dive, we asked Bill for permission to follow him around, figuring he’d be bound to find something cool. We weren’t disappointed! Most of our dive was spent following these guys around:

The male was carting the female around, often picking her up completely off the ground. Bill said they didn’t seem to be mating – they would have been stomach-to-stomach – so he guessed they’d already finished and the male was just trying to keep her away from other males. We took turns shooting video (Bill and myself) and photos (Jeff), and I think we did a pretty good job of not getting in each other’s way.

Dive #2 was a bit of an adventure for everyone. We anchored a bit far away from the reef, and had to swim over sand for some time to reach it. Jeff and I actually had more fun in the sand than we did when we finally hit reef: we found a siphonophore floating around in the water column, several sheep crabs, and saw our first California pipefish (who promptly hid in the sand). We were in a large cove, but there was the danger of current if you got too close to the edge of the point, plus lots of wind at the surface, so we were careful to keep track of our heading going out and coming back. To my delight, we surfaced about 30 feet from the boat. Compasses are wonderful things.

And the Christians didn’t have any, apparently. In groups of three and four, they started surfacing off in the distance and swimming back on the surface. (With a compass, you can take a heading and then descend 5 feet to swim back – much easier). Our divemaster hopped in to help drag back the ones that were too tired, and pretty soon we had a deckful of exhausted swimmers (including Dr. Bill, who’d lost track of where he was and surfaced at the end of the current line, but hauled himself in and had a good laugh at his own expense about it.)

One group was a good 200 yards off, closer to a second dive boat than to us. We could see them, but couldn’t go get them until everyone else was on board. They blew whistles and inflated safety sausages, even though they weren’t drifting (still well inside the cove). It’s always scarier when you’re the one bobbing on the waves, I guess! And I know firsthand how easy it is to surface far from the boat…. but I have to say these folks really started rubbing me the wrong way back on board. All I heard was bitching about how that was way too advanced a dive site, and why did the boat make them swim all the way back instead of coming to get them? (They did go to get the farthest group, but everyone else was within range of the current line.)

Some were talking about how they thought they might die, and kept thinking of their kids; this seemed more than a bit melodramatic to me. Others immediately started bragging about the swim they’d just made, and how it must have been a mile. Um – not.

I helped get people out of BCs and dragged fins and tanks around on deck, and tried to have sympathy for the tired and crying ones – but the whining ones just pissed me off, especially after seeing how the crew bent over backwards to drag everyone in.

I could have told them it wasn’t that hard a dive site, and that the conditions were actually quite nice, but I didn’t want to scare them away from future dives in SoCal…

Sunday we opted out of diving and gave topside a chance. We’d never taken any of the inland tours before, so we signed up for the 2-hour “Skyline Drive” bus tour up to the airport and back. It was interesting to hear about the history of Catalina from the tour guide, but the tour itself was pretty boring – especially because the bus didn’t stop at all except at the airport, which just isn’t that photogenic. We did see some buffalo off in the distance, and Jeff managed to get a shot from his seat in the bus with a telephoto lens:

When we made it back to town, we really wanted to head back up into the hills so we could take some scenic photos of Avalon. We decided to shell out to rent a golf cart for an hour, which you can drive up to the roads that make a perimeter around the town.

And that was pretty much the end of our weekend. We had a great time diving, making fun of people (seriously, the people-watching on Avalon is outstanding), eating, and golf carting. I just wish we could do this every weekend!

Feel free to check out topside pictures, underwater pictures, and my dive logs.