Posted by Musicalmike on October 04, 2004 at 12:00:30:
I was out with my son and two friends at Santa Cruz Isl on Sunday. We were a bit west of Shaw Anch, anchored in about thirty feet of water. I've got a fairly small boat (20ft skipjack) that we launched from Ventura Harbor. The conditions were fairly nice going there and back with no wind and 1-2 ft swell. Visibility was up around 50-60ft at the site with no current and little (if any) surge. We did two dives mostly for photograpy, but I found 6 dinner plate size scallops and saw many lobsters. The highlight of the trip was brushing up againt a 100+lb giant sea bass. I got some great pictures and some vid clip footage.
The lowlight of the trip was when the Explorer dive boat moved into the dive site. They had arrived at the site about an hour after we had anchored and they set up a reasonable distance from us in about 60 ft of water. This was fine with me. After I had come up from the 2nd dive, I was waiting for the other two divers on our group to come back from there dive. I noticed the Explorer had picked up anchor and was heading right towards us. I'm not sure if the captain knows what a dive flag looks like as he came within 100ft of my boat that was flying one. I still had two divers in the water. I stood up tall on my seat and and put my hands up as if to say, "what are you doing so close to my divers"? He came out of his wheel house and said "what's your problem? I answerd, "I still have divers in the water". He answered "how many"? I said "does it really matter?. Yes he was close enough to converse with and continued to drop anchor less then 100ft from my boat. I don't think there is a specific LAW that he was breaking. Only the laws of safety, courtesy and common sense. Due to the lack of respect he has for fellow divers, I would never use his charter service, nor reccommend it to any safety conscious divers.