There were no waves at Redondo Beach this afternoon so I decided to finish off a tank. I swam out beyond the end of the pier and could still see the bottom. I dropped perfectly into the salad bowl and began scouring the algae for signs of life. I found a tiny nudibranch on the end of a stick. I thought it was a juvenile Polycera atra, but when I looked at my first picture I was surprised to see it was a hedgpethi. I had never seen one until a couple weeks ago when we found two.
I would have made a lousy buddy, as I took 47 shots of the little guy over a span of 28 minutes. I may have some algal growth on my drysuit after that dive.
Satisfied that at least one of the shots would come out, I moved on. I spotted a tiny Spanish Shawl in a flower bed of hydroids. Just before surfacing I took one last shot of a juvenile horn shark in four feet of water.
Visibility was an incredible twenty feet, and I was toasty in the 62F water.