Date: 8/27/05
Dive Site: Redondo Submarine Canyon
Dive Start Time: 20:55
Air Temp: 72degF
Water Temp at Depth: 57degF
Surf at Entry/Exit: approx 2ft – mostly wind chop
Visibility: 2-30ft+
Max. Depth: 95ft
Bottom Time: 33min

I showed up at the Veterans Park parking lot just before 8pm, to meet up with few Sandeaters to do a night dive in the submarine canyon. By about 8:30pm only three other divers had shown up – a young scientist from JPL named Akso, and Jim and his 15-year old son (didn’t get his name) from Orange County. I buddied-up with Akso and we hit the water just before 9pm.

The NOAA swell model had indicated very small swells, but didn’t account for the significant wind chop was that was coming ashore as 2ft waves at 3 second intervals. There was no problem getting through the surf zone, but swimming through the chaotic waves on the surface was unpleasant – we both ended up swallowing a lot of water. We dropped down a little earlier than planned – in about 20ft of water to escape the choppy conditions. The visibility started out at about 2ft but by the time we reached 25ft depth it was wide-open, as far as our lights would shine.

We didn’t see much in the way of marine life until we hit about 40ft depth. Then we were surrounded by creatures on all sides. There were crabs of all sizes, shapes, and colors, small shrimp, dozens and dozens of scorpionfish, a juvenile thornback ray, a few cusk eels, a couple of spotfin sculpins, many soles, flounders, and a 24in. halibut, two small octopi, and a juvenile horn shark. We had a fun, in-your-face encounter with an aggressive sarcastic fringehead, and found our largest animal – a 3ft shovelnose guitarfish at about 90ft depth. We followed the guitarfish for a couple of minutes, until it started taking us deeper than we wanted to go.

The only little hiccup occurred as I was removing a fin on the exit; I stumbled, got tumbled while taking off fin #1, then lost hold of fin #1 while taking off fin #2. We scanned the surf zone with our lights for a few minutes and managed to locate and retrieve the wayward fin: there’s something to be said for using bright colored fins for beach diving.

All in all it was a fine outing with a nice bunch of guys.