Dive Details

Dive August 5 2003

Location	Dive Time	Maximum Depth
Point Lobos	42 minutes	53 feet
Point Lobos	31 minutes	66 feet

This is a long report on a very education series of dives, written from my perspective. Cedric has a report of the dive from his perspective. We planned a dive for a Monday at Point Lobos with a couple of workmates, Tracey Thomas and Cedric Beust and a friend of Cedric's Peter. I met Tracey and Cedric at the dive shop where we picked up some rental gear for Tracey and tanks. We met Peter at the entrance station to Lobos. Upon gearing up, Cedric discovered that he was missing his wet suit (whoops gonna need that), and I noticed that I only had one set of my integrated weights. (I had gone on a dive in Florida where I took my gear and putting both sets of my integrated weights in my dive bag put it over the weight limit for the airlines, so I put one set of my weights into our other suitcase. I hadn't put everything back together in my dive bag and didn't do a pre-dive check at home prior to leaving for Pt. Lobos). So we had to jump in his car and drive all the way back to Monterey to get me a weight belt and Cedric his gear.

It was a beautiful day for diving, the weather was sunny and warm, there was absolutely no wave action or surge, it was like glass. The hope was that the visibility would also cooperate. As I recall the visibility was a passable 20-30 feet. The light in the kelp forests was beautiful as always, and the water did not feel all that cold. The amount of kelp was very impressive as it always is at summer. Kelp apparently an grow at a prodigious rate when it has good sunlight, and Monterey had had a lot of sunny summer days, so this year was above average.

Anyway after finally getting our gear together, we paired up with me and Cedric buddying and Tracey going with Peter. We decided on Cannery Point as our destination,after a short surface swam out to the middle of the bay, we descended and made out way out towards the mouth of the cove. I forgot to turn on my dive computer prior to getting into the water and only noticed after we were already down 30 feet or so. When I attempted to turn the computer on (while under the water), it kept turning on flashing twice and turning off. I thought my computer was broken. After the dive I turned it on and it worked fine. I then realized this behavior was a safety feature of the dive computer. After about 1000 PSI we turned around and made our return. The pace was very relaxing, (as I am prone to believe all dive's should be since you expend much less energy, use less air, and have more bottom time etc.) Peter led the dive, and we kind of all (or at least myself) followed his lead and dove off of his navigation. This turned out to be a lazy habit that is actually quite dangerous, everyone should really be in charge of their own navigation and not rely on any others to navigate for them. On this dive we dove and returned with out incident.

Upon surfacing Peter noticed that he had a very small leak in one of his hoses. He attempted to fix the leak and was unsuccessfully, however given the fact that it was a very slight leak, we went ahead with the second dive. This time our plan was to try to reach some of the rock's just around the corner from Cannery Point just outside the mouth of the cove. We decided to surface swim out as far as possible, descend and make our way to the pinnacles. On our surface swim we quickly ran into the kelp, and still very near the middle decided to descend. Peter led again, and unlike the first dive we kicked pretty hard trying to reach the outside the cove, again I just let him navigate and followed his lead. As you exit the cove, the rocks are to the left, and so we make a left hand curve out. We had really only made it out to some of the interesting rock formations, when we reached our turn around point as dictated by air, which was 1500 PSI. In our return Peter did not account for our left hand turn, so we were actually heading not for the opening of the cove but for the shore just outside of the cove. I am not blaming Peter by any means, we should have all been navigating, however since only Peter was navigating, none of us (or at least I) could offer any other opinions or corrections to the course. Regardless it was apparent we were not heading for the cove entrance so we decided to surface and get our bearings. At this point we were about 150 yards off the shore outside and about 200 yards up the shoreline from the cove entrance. The orange ball is my approximate recollection.

And we were in the middle of a sea of kelp that was growing like weeds in the summer sun. Since Point Lobos is a preserve you are only supposed to enter and exit at the boat ramp, the shore outside the cove is not really conducive to landing anyway, there being no real shore and no trails from the bluff down. So the option was to make our way through the kelp back to the boat ramp. At this point Peter, due to his leak, had approximately 500 PSI left in his tank, which is where the "red" zone is on most gauges, and Tracey had about 700 PSI. They decided rather than try to swim under the kelp, to try to swim through the kelp back to the ramp. There was a swath of kelp they had to cross to a channel that ran through the center of the cove. Cedric and I decided to descend to about 8-15 feet just below the kelp and make our way through the kelp. We decided to head for the shore where we could see there was a narrow channel of open water between the shore and the kelp line. We ONLY did this because it was such a calm day could we do this, had there been any surf this would have been very dangerous as the breaking surf would have smashed us into the rocks. Cedric and I had no problem crawling through a the kelp for 25 yards or so to reach this channel, although I had it easy because Cedric cleared a path for me to follow. You can see our route on the map above in red.

Tracey and Peter on the other hand, due to their low air, decided not to try to descend and started out on the kelp crawl. They chose to go towards the middle of the cove where there is a channel clear from kelp that leads all the way back to the boat ramp. There was a lot more kelp to wade through going that direction than the route that Cedric and I took. Crawling over kelp is no easy matter, and it can be quite dangerous, people have died getting tangled in the kelp. At the best it is very tiring and understandably Tracey got tired and stressed, so they pulled up on a rock to rest. By the time Cedric and I got up the boat ramp and hiked up the bluff things had developed a little. Tracey and Peter were by no means in any physical or mortal danger. They were just tired and daunted by the kelp. Tracey and Peter had motioned to people on shore that they could use help, someone had launched a kayak to try to go help them and a ranger had been notified. The ranger found Cedric and I and began to ask us some questions, he mentioned that he had called the Fire Department and it wasn't too long before we heard the sirens making their way down Highway One. Meanwhile the father and son in the kayak had a tough time making their way out across the kelp, and they managed to finally reach Tracey and Peter. They put Tracey's tank and weights into the boats with at Tracey hanging off the boat and Peter crawling behind they made very slow progress. Meanwhile the Fire Department launched a Zodiac and quickly made their way through the kelp to they kayak and loaded Tracey and Peter up and hauled them back to the boat ramp. It is almost certain that Tracey and Peter would have with the help of the kayak slowly but safely made it back to shore, but things went much faster with the Fire Department. Apparently over the past 6 weeks there had been 4 deaths, two of them looked like kelp related deaths, so the Park Service and Fire Department were on heightened alert. Based on Tracey and Peter's state at the time, I think they absolutely made the right decision. In hind sight and after reading lengthy discussion threads on ba_diving, I think that they could have safely swum just below the surface and made it back. But hindsight, experience and arm-chair analysis out of the situation are much easier. All and all, a set of great dives and some very worthwhile (and thankfully painless) lessons learned.

Tracey suiting up.