Charlie's Diving Blog: Two Dives on the Pinnacles, Carmel Bay, 6-19-2014

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Two Dives on the Pinnacles, Carmel Bay, 6-19-2014

Greg Hoberg and I battered our way through choppy seas down to Carmel Bay today. We checked out the Pinnacles after concluding Cypress Point was a little squirrelly. We were rewarded with gorgeous blue water and 40 ft visibility. The temperature was a chilly 48 degrees but we weren't surprised because we'd watched the surface temperature drop 2.5 degrees from Pt Joe to the Pinnacles. We made two dives even though we were deeply chilled after our long first dive with depths to 75 ft. On the second dive we made sure we swam a lot more which meant taking fewer pictures with my 60 mm macro lens....sure wish I'd been shooting wide angle today. We saw several ling cod from average sized up to quite large (it is great that the Pinnacles is a no take marine reserve). We also saw several cabezon and zillions of different nudibranchs. One of the things we took note of were the number of sea urchins out in the open. Many of the sea stars and especially the sunflower stars have been decimated by sea star wasting disease and it looks like the number of juvenile sea urchins is climbing with the loss of key predators (happily our local sea otters will hammer the larger sea urchins so it is unlike that our kelp beds will get decimated by sea urchins, I think).

I'm seeing many more sea urchins since one of the major predators for juvenile sea urchins, the sea stars, have been hammered by sea star wasting syndrome.