Conditions were gorgeous. Bill Brush, the "legend" who started the Chocolate Lobster dive and I headed out of MDR early this morning. As flat as I have seen it in years plus warm and sunny. Good thing as the engine thermostat stopped working which leaves it in full open position so that the water from our hot water tap off was lukewarm at best. Of course I left my bag at home so no camera or cell phone to take pics. We had a huge group of young sea lions swimming around jumping and pack swimming as if they were dolphins. We headed for shallow water given the ideal conditions. Dropped into 40 fsw and sure enough, nice bugs in the shallow rubble and vis a good 25’. We managed to snag a couple of nice limits of bugs with the smallest being 2.5 and the largest we kept about 6 lb. Bill brought up a nice r 7-8 lb bug and while we were discussing should we return it as “too big” (it was on the cusp) we noticed it was a female. It was so large we never even thought it was a lady – one of the largest lady lobsters I’ve seen in many years (no camera, no picture). I took her back to the bottom and put her in a lovely hole with an apology for the abduction and encouraged to get pregnant and have lots of offspring.

Here is a picture of Bill with the days catch (I’m counting on Max to put it up) – 7 each so we are legal as I’d consumed last weekends bugs with a group of friends during the week. We’d better get to eating lobster as we now have our “possession limit” so we can go out next week sometime.

Get out there and get wet! You don’t see conditions like this commonly and it looks like it is going to hold for maybe as long as a week.

• Re: A gorgeous day halibug 15:46:10 10/29/11 (0)
• Re: A gorgeous day Andy S 16:30:08 10/28/11 (0)