Inside Sunset Point, Carmel Bay March 3, 2017

Greg Hoberg and I took his Zodiac RIB out for a dive trip last Friday.  As we headed out a much stiffer wind from the north came up and as we rounded Point Pinos we saw some swells significantly larger than the four foot forecast.  We hoped that the wind would shift to the West before we had to pound our way back North from Carmel Bay after our dive and fortunately, it did so, per the forecast.  We went inside of Sunset Point to dive in order to get out of the significant westerly swell and we didn't want to go further because of the risk of rising winds.  The area behind Sunset Point is normally covered for hundreds of yards by a dense canopy of giant kelp but right now the entire area is entirely devoid of giant kelp due to the hordes of sea urchins that followed after the demise of a top predator, large sea stars.  We've seen signs of recovery of sea stars and giant and bull kelp on some recent dives but we sure didn't see anything like that in this area, unfortunately.  The other thing that was noticeably different than usual on this trip was a complete dearth of sea lions, I don't think we've ever failed to encounter sea lions on any of our many previous outings.

We anchored in about 50 ft of water and we ended up with 35 ft of visibility (vertical was close to 50) and cold 48 degree water.  On our last trip we couldn't get our anchor up when we were ready to start home so Greg (I was out of air..) had to go down and get it free.  When we start a dive the first thing we do is go down the anchor line in order to a) insure ourselves that the anchor should hold so our boat doesn't leave the dive site and b) that the anchor is positioned so that after we've finished our dive and gotten back in the boat we can successfully pull it up.  When we started this dive we clearly had those goals in mind and we found that the anchor line, anchor chain, and anchor were wrapped through large boulders and we wouldn't have been able to retrieve our anchor.  So Greg carefully re-positioned our anchor and we proceeded with a very good dive.  Lots of light thanks to no kelp canopy and a too rare sunny day and very good visibility.  We saw the usual varieties of rockfish plus lingcod and cabezon.  It was a long dive and we had to do a short surface swim back to the boat after our safety stop.   I couldn't get the bloody, bloody, anchor up, in the freezing, chilling wind.  My teeth were chattering when I finished our safety stop and I couldn't believe, and almost couldn't execute, getting my tank, weightbelt, hood, gloves, fins, and mask back on in order to go back down and retrieve the anchor.   When I went back down I couldn't believe how the line went back into another large set of boulders and I had to get under a large overhang, set my feet and push like crazy in order to free the badly wedged anchor.  Memo: back to checking that we can get the anchor free by going back down to the anchor before we get out of the water when we get back to the boat....

But the dive was very good, here are some pictures, for more please go to:  https://goo.gl/photos/5Fc5uMGhomtde16V8

    Male Cabezon guard their mate's fertilized eggs, as this guy is doing here.  The dark mass to his right are the hundreds of eggs.

                                Lingcod love to perch on rocks where they can survey their surroundings as this one is doing.  You can see that we had decent light and visibility.  Note there is no kelp to be seen, not even old kelp holdfasts.  Sea urchins have scoured the bottom of all vegetation.  Note lack of sea stars,normally everywhere you look (like kelp as well...).

                                           Big rocks with urchins.

                                          Big rocks with big anemones

                                                  Hurrah, a leather star, yuck, more sea urchins.

                                          Near the farthest point on our dive we did finally see a few stands of palm kelp.

                       Hurrah, a lone spiny sea star, where you'd normally see many....

As we were nearing the finish of this dive we saw an enormous lingcod swimming past under an overhang into a cave under the rocks where we had no chance at a picture.  He was huge, the second largest I've ever seen.  Then, I was down to 600 lbs of air so we started up for our safety stop but  I spotted a nice sized beautiful lingcod swim over and park on top of this large coralline algae encrusted boulder and I did a double take and then a quick double back because, while I've got many photos of lingcod and many photos of cabezon, it's a rare opportunity to get both in the same shot, as you can see here.  You do see the cabezon as well as the lingcod, right?  He's about half the lingcod's body length to the left of the lingcod, next to a token sprig of dark sea weed.  1/3 from bottom of the frame, 1/3 from the left edge...

                                Here you can actually see the cabezon, pretty well matched to the coralline algae he is parked on top of....you accidentally scare about three cabezon for everyone you spot in time to avoid startling in time to take a picture.

                             Here's another shot of the cabezon, sans flash, so you can appreciate his camouflage with natural (though far far brighter than usual conditions!) lighting conditions.