What? Where's the rain?
The forecast was for rain with possible thunderstorms, which seemed to have scared many divers away from participating in this years annual Avalon Harbor Cleanup dive. But at least three intrepid divers from our club was not put off by the forecast. And whatta ya know, we were rewarded with a beautiful day on Catalina. Blue skies with a little bit of scattered clouds, and no wind… wow. Meanwhile, hail was falling on some parts of L.A.
Although we were here for the cleanup dive, this year we opted to just dive in the underwater park. The reason being Andrea and I needed to tune our buoyancy since we both had new gear. After checking our weight and trim, we started our fun part of the dive. A semi-strong current was running from west to east laying the kelp down horizontally which made us kick harder than usual. This was not a bad thing since it helped me burn off that muffin I had in the morning. The vis was not great, but not bad either, about 25-30ish. Water temp was a cool 55 degrees (did I mention before how I love my drysuit?). The usual fish and critters greeted us as we swam around the park. I did notice some individual squid egg casings around 40 fsw, but nothing in mass. Overall, a nice Casino Point dive. Meanwhile, the other divers were pulling out some interesting items out of the harbor during the cleanup dive, but nothing like the amount of junk we used to recover five years ago. There are less and less junk in the harbor every year... which is a good thing right? Oh yea, and our buoyancy check? I think I can take another 4 pounds of lead off my weight belt!
After the dive we headed over to Coyote Joe's for lunch and drinks. The day turned out to be a really nice day after all. Thanks to John and Andrea for being brave enough to come out to dive with me on this supposedly the worst day of the month ;-)
-Kaz
