Posted by Wayne on June 17, 2002 at 13:14:45:
So there we were in Avalon with a bunch of kids. My kids (I had 2 of the 4 with me) and I had always wanted to free dive in Lover's Cove and had never been in there. Recently we had been on the semi-submersible (glass sided boat) with non diving friends and family, and it looked pretty good. So me and my kids set off. Our friend Mark dropped us off in the middle of the cove in his dingy and promised to come back for us an 1/2 hour with the rest of the kiddies. We knew that the ones coming to join us were poor swimmers and we all decided to go with wetsuits and no lead.
Now we knew the business end of the cove is very shallow and since I did not have a weight belt with me, I decided to enjoy floating along and looking down in shallow water while being toasty in my 7-mil suit.
As soon as we rolled out fo the boat, I looked down and directly below us was a decent sized black sea bass! We were all stuck to the surface by our suits and could only observe from above. We followed it around for a while until we got bored.
Then we went to the reef (ledge) where there is some interesting life. The trouble is that there is a 10 foot wide area that is nice and the rest is 20 feet deep over sand or 5 feet over small rocks. So we tried to swim in that nice, narrow area. Every 5 minutes or so we would hear the horn of the tourist boats as they were about to run us over. They follow the same track that we were on. They are like the rides at disneyland, except they steer over an invisible track. If you swim where it is pretty, you will have to dodge the boats.
Well, now we have "snorkeled" Lover's Cove and will never have to do that again. I guess it is good for the non-swimmers who seemed to be the majority there. But we saw the BSB over the sand, about 50 yards from the kelpy ledge, so it was not all bad!
Wayne