Monastery Beach September 2, 2017

Guy Foster and I had an excellent, but very exhausting, dive at Monastery Beach on Carmel Bay yesterday.  The hike from my car, parked as closely to the shortest path to the north Monastery entry point was exhausting....ball bearing sand, tall dune to get over, steep decline to the water....and the heat - it was 78 degrees which is amazingly hot for there and amazingly oppressive in heavy wetsuits with heavy weightbelts and tanks.  Helping to encourage us on were Humpback whales about 200 yards offshore diving on the Carmel Canyon.  The surf was tiny - about a foot or two and the visibility was 35 to 45 ft.  It was a chilly 49 degrees down deep, so it was a fresh upwelling which is why the water was so clear.  This was Guy's first shore dive at Monastery and, based on our mutual exhaustion after making our way slowly, agonizingly, back to the car, possibly his last shore dive there, maybe mine, too!  It ain't just the mileage, it's the years.  Maybe I'm wising up a tiny bit in my advancing age but probably not...based on history.  I shot a lot of pictures on this long dive, below are some, for many more please go to:
https://goo.gl/photos/guC9oDnJozKWXVZu6

We snorkeled out about 75 yards before dropping down in about 32 ft of water.  The bottom rapidly sloped down from that point, our maximum depth on this dive was about 70 ft, we could have easily, chillingly, dropped down to 100.

I spotted this battered Cow crab on the bottom shortly after we descended.  The crab was missing one of his claws and a couple of his legs.  Wonder what he had a tough encounter with?  It's a rough neighborhood down there.

 A large moonshell with its mantel out, cruising through the sand.

                       Guy with a nice sized lingcod, we each saw three or four on this dive.

    Guy missed seeing this second lingcod.  You can see the excellent light, visibility and extreme ruggedness of the rock structure at this beautiful dive site.  Monastery is only safe to dive under extremely calm conditions.

                                 With my pointer light off I was able to make a close approach for this shot.

 Monastery's Giant Kelp Bed is in excellent shape, we saw few sea urchins and the few we saw were where they belong - tucked into crevices for shelter.

                       Diving this site with good light and clear water is magical!

 Here's something I haven't seen in a couple of years due to the urchin plague which reduced all our kelp forests.  This is a giant kelp holdfast which has pulled free from the bottom due to how large the kelp has grown and how much force got exerted on it.