Jeff and I just got back from a beautiful day of diving at Santa Barbara Island. We booked the trip on the Peace boat with California Digital Diving (owned by Ken and Rita Ashman). Ken was kind enough to round up a housing for our Canon digital rebel – apparently, it showed up at his place about an hour before he left for this trip, so it was a close call! We were hoping to check out the Ikelite, which is a bit cheaper, but Ken was only able to get the Aquatica (the main difference is that the Aquatica is metal, while the Ikelite is clear plastic). No complaints! He also loaned us a strobe, and gave us lots of tips and advice before sending us out to play.

We got off to a good start: the seas were surprisingly calm on the whole trip out. It takes about 5 hours to get from Ventura harbor to S.B. island, so the boat leaves at 2am while everyone’s asleep. Usually once the boat starts moving, I barely get any sleep; but this ride was so calm (and the bunks pretty comfy) that I slept straight through til morning.

We woke up at Santa Barbara to sunny skies, flat seas, no currents, and great visibility! Our first stop was at Black Cavern, where Jeff and I just puttered around a plateau in about 50 feet and played with the camera. Unfortunately, the strobe wasn’t working so well – but we did have fun playing with a sea lion who kept coming down to check us out. Back on the boat, Ken swapped out the strobe, and our second dive was in a fabulous kelp forest at a dive site called “The Notch.” Dive #3 was at one of the sea lion rookeries on the island, by Webster point. The visibility here was not so great, but Jeff had a good time trying to get decent pictures of sea lions!

Here are two of my favorites from the trip. Both were taken with the kit lens, which is basically a wide angle (though it can zoom to 50mm). The first is an island kelpfish, about 6 inches long; the second I like because you can get a sense of the kelp forest around the sea lion.

The rest of the pics are here: gallery.laityphoto.com/v/underwater/uw-20040906_santabarbara.