We pulled up to the parking lot at Nicholas Canyon in Malibu at 7:30am Saturday morning, and wandered to the edge of the hill to check out the waves below. The original plan was to dive right below the parking lot: there’s a rocky area to the left and sand to the right, so we could practice both types of entry. However, the surf was up (as in, big red letters saying “HIGH SURF ADVISORY” on the LA County beach website), rendering the rocky entry too risky. The sandy entry would have been do-able (and by do-able, I mean for crazy ADP people; not for divers just out for fun). But it was chock full of surfers: several dozen crowded the area. I was amazed at how rarely they ran into each other, but it seemed unwise to throw a bunch of divers into the mix as well.

A semi-paved path headed downhill to the west, out to more sandy beach. Some mild rip currents were muddying the waters out there, and making for less-perfect waves, so it was surfer-free. That’s where we decided to dive.

The surf… well, like I said, it was up. Kevin described it as 3′-5′ surf, but I’m pretty sure I saw some 6 and 7 foot faces. Whatever: they were big. On the plus side, there was both a long period between waves during sets (15 seconds or so), and nice long lulls of smaller waves between the big sets. With timing, it was totally do-able.

We all put on our skin gear (except for a few safety divers on scuba) and went for it. Well, mostly we stood around waiting for the lulls.

After the last big wave of a set had crashed, the next batch of divers would start crabbing sideways into the water, and flop onto our stomachs to start kicking as soon as possible. I made it out without incident (hooray!), and we started the long surface swim to reach a decent depth to set the floats.

After floats had been anchored, it was time to head back in. This is actually the scariest part for me. When you’re going out into the water, you always have the option of bailing and heading back to shore. But once you’re past those breakers… well, now you don’t have any option. You have to go through the surf zone to get back out.

My buddy and I took our time finning back towards the beach, and relaxed on the far side of the surf zone, bobbing on the swell. We faced out to sea, keeping an eye on the swells coming in and waiting for it to get flat, indicating the next lull.

When we were reasonably sure we weren’t about to get smacked by one of those 7-footers, we fired up our fins. Even the small waves had a decent amount of power when they broke right behind you, so everyone came out on hands and knees to avoid getting knocked on their faces.

The downside of crawling out of the water? You drag your equipment through the sand. I apparently managed to get some pretty serious sand inside the inflator hose on my BC, because when I hooked it up to a tank for my scuba dive, it stuck every time I tried to put a little air in. (Resulting in it adding more and more and more air until the BC gets overfilled and vents out the emergency valve.)

Doh.

We tried rinsing it, we tried whacking it, we tried to take it apart. No luck. A few folks tried to convince me that I could just orally inflate, but I wasn’t really up to that level of task-loading on a high-surf beach dive! We were going to be doing navigation exercises in 1-foot visibility: I didn’t want to be worrying about taking my regulator out of my mouth every time I needed to add a little air to my BC, something I’ve only recently begun practicing in the pool. I guess I should practice doing it on my next easy boat dive, just to get more comfortable for when this happens again.

So, once again, I sat out the actual beach dive. I made myself useful by hiking back up the hill to retrieve water, snacks, and my camera, so I could record others getting their asses kicked by waves.

Not one of the biggest ones:

Once again, I tried not to totally waste my time: I played a bit near the surf zone with Kevin. Both of us got whacked pretty good by some of the larger rocks that were getting knocked around, and built up some really impressive collections of pebbles in our wetsuits and booties.

As the divers finally headed back into shore, I pitched in where I could: yelling “wave!”, helping to take off fins, grabbing floats from divers as they hauled them through the surf. I was pretty bummed about missing the dive, even though it sounds like I didn’t miss much.

Then it was back up the hill again and time to eat. That’s something all divers are pretty darned good at.

Rinsing out my gear at home that evening, I was astounded at how many pebbles worked their way into nooks and crannies of my BC. (Not to mention sand, but at least that eventually goes down the drain.) I basically brought home a few pounds of beach – and I didn’t even actually dive. Yikes!

More pics here: Nicholas Canyon