November 12, 2013

Was working in LA for a few days and had a day off and was able to go over and dive Casino Point on Catalina Island. One of my goals was to finally get to dive in a healthy kelp forest. Dove with Stu of Ocean Diving Adventures of Venice Beach. Casino point is a marine park right next to shore. You go down the stairs and you are in kelp. There is a van at the point that rents weights and tanks. There is a shuttle service to bring your dive gear over from and to the ferry. The walk between the Ferry and the point is along the water front of Avalon. A very charming town. Great place to spend a weekend. Seas were essentially flat. Went through a huge school stretching for it seemed miles of leaping dolphins on the way over. Air temp in the 60s. Water temp was a comfortable 63. Visibility under water was in excess of 60 ft. Dives were great. Gliding through the kelp forest, light streaming from overhead, fish life all around. I'm hooked. If I can get some more Kelp dives in some how I definitely will. Unfortunately my photo skills do not give any large scale photos of the forest. Probably should have turned off the flash. I did shoot a couple of short videos with my DC1200. It takes video but they are not as good as the latest cameras. I had trouble including them here. They are on my Facebook page. There was a professional photographer/writer working on an article about Catalina that took some pictures of us during the divse. He was kind enough to share some of the pictures with us. The first two are his. The first one is of me. The second is Stu and I. I have the yellow mask.

The juvenile Garibaldi are also pretty with spots but they seemed less brave.

There were quite a few calico bass (also known as kelp bass). Some of them quite large since this is a marine sanctuary. Saw some over 2 ft long.

The Kelp is very beautiful and creates interesting patterns be it the roots

The stalks

Or up near the surface

Found this very colorful starfish

On the rocks there were lots of these very small Bluebanded Goby, just an inch or two long fish. Very colorful.

The real hams though were the California Sheepshead. Unlike the sheepshead we see in NC these were colorful, actually do look sort of like sheep, and get big. The biggest we saw was probably 20 pounds. They are curious and not at all shy about being around divers..

The next photo is of a tube anemone. It reminds me of the ones we see in NC but this one is much browner.

We saw quite a few spiny lobsters.

Found a large abalone that we fed some algae to

School of Blacksmith and one Senorita. The senorita is actually that brightly colored.

Finally a few more kelp pictures. I find all the patters kelp forms fascinating.