Dives off the Aquarium and inside Lover's Point October 6, 2018

Guy Foster and I dived with Sanctuary last Saturday.  A major wind event was forecast and indeed struck that afternoon with winds near gale force and a very rough Monterey Bay.  Due to the forecast and already somewhat rough conditions both our dives were deep inside Monterey Bay.  Due to my drysuit problems which resulted in my sending it to DUI in San Diego for leak repairs and valve replacements, I was also without my dive camera since I took the opportunity to send it into Backscatter for refurbishment and replacement of the leak detection circuit.....which I drowned on my trip to the Revillagigedos Islands (Socorro) last April, fortunately without totally destroying my camera and lens...

So on these dives I shot some video with Guy's gopro.

We had 20 ft visibility and 56 degrees water temp on our first dive, up to 30 ft of visibility and 54 degrees at our dive further out in the Bay near Lover's Point.

A highlight of our first dive was Guy's finding a really cool flatfish, after much research, I found that there is a bewildering variety of soles, flounders, turbot, Halibut, and plaice, I decided it was a Curlfin Sole.  Below are a couple of Guy's pictures of it.

After several windy days, here's the water temperature graph of a NOAA buoy over the outer Monterey Canyon, it's only measuring down a couple of feet so the temps are significantly warmer than what you'd find at say, 40 to 60 ft....So you can see the significant temperature drop.  Down at 50 ft or so sometimes the temperature will drop as low as 47 degrees from our average of around 52 degrees.  So, clearer water until the sun triggers an algae and plankton bloom, at the cost of bone chilling temperatures if you are diving in a wetsuit...