First dive:
Breakwater... followed the pipe out to the Metridian Fields.
whitaker and I love the Metridian Fields. I guess these anemones things normally only live in incredibly deep water, but because of the sea floor in this area and how the water gets pushed around (forgot all the details), there's a ton of these things in only 40 feet of water.So after finding and following the pipe out, you go due north and suddenly in the distance there's fields of bright, bright white all around you... and these things are huge.
Pictures on the web were lacking, but I found these, now mirrored here:
I really need to get a camera enclosure so I can go and take my own pictures.
Anyway, very peaceful. Whitaker and I like to just adjust our buoyancy perfect and just remain there motionless for long periods of time, looking around. There's a good dozen or more of these big rocks covered with the metridian, so it's fun to circle around them all... and in the middle some kelp going all the way up to the surface, which looks nice contrasted against the bright water above.
Second dive:
Drove to Lover's Cove/Park (had never been there before). We suited up on a big cement platform that had stairs going down into the water so we didn't have to do a beach entry (we'd never seen that before). After talking to other divers coming in, we got pointed in a good direction, took a heading, dropped, and followed our compasses out to an incredibly cool area with big rocks and steep walls and canyons and lots of fish ...
Normally at ~40 feet the surge from above is gone and the water is pretty still, but it was bad above (we'd seen the crazy breakers in this area when we arrived), so we were getting pushed around a lot under water, even at 40 feet. But that was a lot of the fun... big schools of fish were being thrown all over.
The highlight of the dive was when Whitaker and I were swimming up between two rocks walls, angled apart in a "V", in a sort of narrow canyon... the sun was right ahead of us, big schools of fish everywhere, bright starfish on the walls, and then a big current comes down the V, much stronger than regular, Whitaker and I kicking as hard as possible just to stay in place, and a school of big fish then comes at us, backwards, being pushed behind us. Pretty surreal. Again, wish I'd had a camera.