Saturday night, we met up with Bonnie and Mike at Vets Park to look for mating squid. They usually run just before or after a full moon, but we got reports as early as last Wednesday that they were out in force, a week early. Since I missed out on the squid run last month (Jeff made it, but I sissied out on the surf), I was determined to get in the water this time. With a video camera.

Bonnie beat us there, and called to let me know that she was looking at the “tiniest little waves,” which really made my day. Turns out her idea of “tiniest little waves” is maybe a smidge different than mine, but they were certainly do-able. The lulls were knee-high, with the occasional set of waist-high waves. Every now and then, a chest-high wave would come through, but they looked pretty low power.

So we piled down the stairs and headed in, Jeff toting his monster camera rig, and me clinging to my smaller video housing. I’d only made one surf entry with it before, and that was when the conditions were similar to a lake. I got a little nervous as we approached the water, but that’s not particularly unusual for me.

Since my hands were occupied with the camera, I went for a fins-on entry so I wouldn’t have to juggle them. If I had timed it slightly better, like Bonnie and Mike did, this would have worked out perfectly: when you get knocked down, you just start swimming. Pathetically, I got knocked down by a couple of 2-footers when I wasn’t even to knee-deep water yet. The bottom was full of ups and downs, so there was no getting past the surf zone by swimming – especially not trying to keep the camera out of the sand. I flailed in the surf for a few minutes, waffling over how hard to try to crawl forward, before finally deciding to back out and try again.

And I’m really glad I did. My second attempt went much more smoothly – I didn’t fall over til I was in water deep enough to start swimming, and hit a nice long lull besides. We kicked out to join Bonnie and Mike, and then descended in separate buddy groups to look for squid.

When we hit 70 feet, we started bumping into rug-sized patches of squid eggs. A few dead squid rolled around on the sand, and every now and then a handful of live ones would cluster around the eggs. Females carried new egg pouches to deposit, and fended off over-amorous males, who jumped anyone they could. A lot of them would approach the camera and check out the lights, pulsing red colors as they backed away from me.

One in particular really took a liking to Jeff, getting up close to his mask and investigating his camera.

The vis was only so-so to begin with, and that deep the bottom is super-silty and easy to stir into a brown haze even if you’re being careful (plus, the squid themselves kick up some sand in their digging around). So Jeff didn’t get as many good pictures as last month, but I did manage to capture a bit of squid action on camera! Click on the picture to see a :48 second quicktime movie:

Squid Run 1/27/07:

We also spotted a pipefish, bat ray, thornback ray, and hundreds of shy, half-buried sand crabs. The only bummer was how little time we were able to spend in the squid zone; when you’re at 70-90 fsw, you suck down air (and soak up nitrogen) awfully quickly, and after 20 minutes it was very much time to leave. It was hard to keep moving upslope when there was constantly something we wanted to stop and photograph, but as my air edged under 800psi it got easier to keep moving! We surfaced after a safety stop with just a little under 500psi left, and I made a textbook exit standing up. It’s always nice to end the dive NOT covered in sand from crawling out on your knees.