I was just digging around in my gallery… here’s one for Ben and Kathy:

No making fun of my dress (or my sister’s dress).

Feel free to make fun of the boys, however. :)

We spent today at Catalina on the Cee Ray. When we crawled into our “double” bunk last night, I remembered why I’m not a huge fan of this boat! There are 4 double bunks, and they aren’t, really: at the feet, they’re the same width as a single, and they widen to about 1.5 times that at the head. Comfy.

It was a pretty rough ride out; for the first time, I thought I might actually wind up hanging over the rail. We had 3-4 foot swell all the way out to Catalina. The plan was to dive Farnsworth, on the far side of Catalina, but our captain took one peek at the conditions on the other side of the island and turned the boat around to stay on the lee side. Smart move!

We had some great dives anyway, at Eagle Reef and Doctor’s Cove. Eagle Reef may be my new favorite Catalina dive site: it’s basically series of huge piles of rocks, covered with kelp and lots of fish. Since it’s actually made up of distinct boulders, there are lots of nooks and crannies to go poking around in, and I scared up quite a few lobsters and shrimp. Mostly, I enjoyed the fish-watching. There were huge schools of baitfish (anchovy, topsmelt, sardines) darting all over the place. We also saw all the usual suspects: sheephead (I saw some fighting each other, mouth-to-mouth), garibaldi chasing away intruding fish, senoritas who darted at their reflection in Jeff’s dome port, juvenile kelp bass that would drift right up to your mask, the pretty blue-and-yellow juvenile blacksmith, rock wrasse and opaleye. And of course, the rocks were littered with bluebanded gobies, one of my favorite fish.

Jeff puttered around getting some practice in with the camera, while I settled in for 45 minutes of fish-watching (with occasional breaks for Jeff-watching). Visibility was great, and the water was warm – great place for 2 long dives!

Our second site of the day was Doctor’s Cove. Not quite as nice: a shallow kelp forest next to lots of sand. We didn’t find anything too exciting in the kelp, but on both of our dives we ran into bat rays out in the sand, munching around in it to dig up food. Each time, the ray was swarmed by other fish trying to get some leftovers. We also scared up a couple of soles in the sand and chased them around for a while, and several times ALMOST managed to get a picture of a giant kelpfish – unfortunately, when you play hide and seek with a kelpfish IN THE KELP, you’re bound to lose.

It’s a good thing I had some Drammamine left: if we thought the ride out was rough, the ride back was even worse! The wind and waves kicked up quite a bit while we were parked at Doctor’s Cove. We were right at the northwest tip of the island, and could see around the corner where the whitecaps were really picking up. As the boat headed for home, I popped a pill and went to try to sleep through the worst of it. Luckily, I succeeded, but woke in time to enjoy some of the “smaller” 6-8 foot swell as we surfed our way back towards the harbor. Our bunk was up in the bow next to the outside bulkhead, where we could hear something (the bilge? Water tank? Sewer system?) sloshing around every time the boat rocked. And lying on your side was impossible; you got knocked back and forth so much that lying flat on your back was the only option.

I felt fine – yay for Drammamine!

Pics for this dive are here: http://gallery.laityphoto.com/v/underwater/uw-20040919_catalina.

We spent the afternoon in Pasadena. First, Jeff and I grabbed lunch at Corner Bakery. When I sat down, I noticed Ben and Kathy’s friends Sam and Dan sitting at the table next to me. I think I’ve met them once in person, but it was some time ago – mostly, I recognized her because I occasionally read her blog (which is linked from both of the Brantleys’ sites). I wasn’t sure I should say anything in case it was a little weird (“Hi, you don’t really know me, but I read your journal…”). At some point, we made eye contact – and I could tell she recognized me as well.

So I said something like “Hey, aren’t you Sam.. Ben and Kathy’s friend? I’m Anastasia; I think we’ve met once. And I read your blog.”

To which she immediately replied: “Oh yeah – you have the underwater pictures on your site. I look at them some mornings when I get into work. And I’ve also looked at your wedding pictures.”

I find it funny that we both kind of know each other, even though we’ve barely met. Gotta love the internet. :)

After lunch, Jeff and I played in the pool with the new camera housing. Ben came to join us and practice his freediving (which he’s getting pretty good at). Jeff took several incredibly unflattering pictures of me, including this one which is nonetheless kind of cool:

And here’s Ben crawling along the bottom of the pool, as he tries to extend his freediving time past a whole minute:

I was completely wiped out after playing in the pool, which surprised me because we really did very little in the way of diving. But I guess we still had to lug all our equipment in and lug it back out, which is half the battle. And it’s just as well I’m tired; it’ll make it easier to sleep on a boat tonight. :) Tomorrow, hopefully, we’ll get to dive at Farnsworth Bank and take some real pictures!

Today I got a little present at work in the form of two UPS boxes from California Digital Diving – our Aquatica housing and it’s various accessories have arrived! One box held the housing and the handles. The other (much larger) box contained the dome port, port shade/protector, strobe, sync cord, strobe arms, and various replacement parts, screws, etc.

Unfortunately, what none of the boxes contained was a readable manual. The Aquatica housing came with a very polite note from Aquatica saying that they had not yet printed the manuals, but if I send in the warranty card they’ll send me one when they’re available. The strobe manual was only in Japanese. I was able to figure some things out from the pictures, but I’m not sure enough of anything to risk dunking it in water just yet:

Other than inserting batteries and setting off a few test flashes, I didn’t try to do anything to the strobe. It has various exposed connectors that I imagine need to have things plugged into them before you get it wet. I do like that it makes a distinctive noise when it’s charging up, and has a light that switches from green to pale red to bright red depending on how charged it is. I tucked the strobe back into one of the boxes and started putting together the housing.

First, I attached the handles to the housing. Easy.

Then, I tackled the dome port and shade. This was a little trickier. The dome sits down on a ledge inside the shade, but it didn’t seem very secure, and had no obvious way to attach it. I did notice about a zillion teeny-tiny, headless screws that came as replacement parts with the shade. I looked closer at the shade and noticed it had similar screws set into its circumfernece in four spots – however, there were no matching holes in the plastic of the dome port base. I finally took a big hint from the tiny screwdriver (I forget what they’re called – the hexagonal-ended, L-shaped thingies) taped into the paper wrapping around the dome port, and just started screwing. The screws ate easily through the plastic at the base of the dome port, until they were halfway lodged in the dome port with the remaining half still in the shade. I shook it around a bit by the shade to make sure it was in there solidly, and it seemed to have worked.

To give it a “dry run,” so to speak, you’re supposed to fill it with paper towels (instead of an expensive camera) and soak the whole thing in the bathtub overnight. So I filled it up and snapped these pictures – the dome port does some funny things to the camera flash!

The whole contraption is now happily sitting in the bathtub – hopefully when I check it tomorrow morning, its innards will be nice and dry!

Today, we made our fourth successful Southern California beach dive – and they’ve all been in Laguna. I think I may have finally been convinced of the merits of beach diving (in Laguna anyway – you’re not going to drag me back to Leo Carillo or Old Marineland anytime soon!)

We hit Shaw’s Cove, in Crescent Bay (off Wave Dr, right next to Laguna Sea Sports). Shaw’s was actually the site of my first attempted beach dive back in November ’99 – the first place my scuba class went after the pool. It turned out to be a rather poor choice that day, with monster waves that kicked the bejeezus out of most of us just trying to go in for a skin dive. The instructor eventually called off the SCUBA portion of the day entirely, but not until I’d already been totally put off the idea of beach diving by my bad experience.

Turns out that when conditions are good, Shaw’s is in fact a very pleasant dive. The stairway down to the beach is a little bit longer than Diver’s Cove or Picnic Beach, but not nearly as bad as Marineland, Woods Cove, or a dozen others – in other words, we both found it pretty do-able. At the bottom, there’s a rocky point jutting directly out into the ocean from the right side of the beach; that’s what we planned to follow.

Not that we didn’t have a few hiccups on the way to the dive. First, there are no facilities at Shaw’s Cove, so I dragged poor Jeff on a mini-hike all the way over to Heisler Park for a bathroom stop. Then, I realized I’d forgotten my flat mask and snorkel, and would have to dive with my HydroOptix (not the end of the world, but I prefer to be able to see on the surface when doing beach dives). Then, I remembered that snorkels are mandatory in Laguna, and the lifeguards will turn you around if you don’t have one – so I walked up to the scuba store a few blocks away and rented a pink snorkel for the day. But wearing a snorkel always makes my HO mask leak – so I wound up borrowing Jeff’s old flat mask instead.

We finally suited up a little before 9am, and headed down to the beach. The surf was almost nonexistant; the occasional 1-2 footer just about reached my waist. Much better than the last time I was here! We made it in without incident, and descended near the rocky point.

We headed south until we came to the crack in the rocks known as “the crevice,” one of the main draws of this site. On a low-surf, low-surge day like today, it was easy to go swimming inside the crevice, through some rocky arches and swim-throughs. We saw lots of fish in there (mostly garibaldi), a huge pile of big lobsters hiding out in a crack, Proliferating Anemones (short pink/purple anemones with thin, short, tapered tentacles), chestnut cowries, and several partially-devoured spiny sea stars (by what, I can’t imagine).

Picture of the crevice from California Diving News:

In the middle of poking around in the crevice, we discovered our camera had been accidentally left on “Land mode,” so none of the pics were really coming out. Oh well!

After checking out the crevice, we continued south along the reef. Jeff spotted a sole in the sand, and an octopus curled up into a hole in the rocks. We also saw several obviously-new divers – Shaw’s is a popular place for classes. One guy was compulsively checking his gauges, and so completely unable to notice that I was pointing out a sole directly under him. Some others kicked up enough sand to reduce the 20+ visibility back down to 10-15 – still pretty good for a beach dive!

The biggest surprise to me was the temperature. On our last beach dive, at nearby Picnic Beach, we found it extremely cold at depth – low 50s! But today, it didn’t go below 66 degrees, even down around 40 feet. We were mostly up around 25, in 68 degree water. I could have done without the hood!

We’d definitely like to go back and check it out some more. Maybe we’re finally learning to love beach diving, which would definitely help save us some money! :)

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.