Two Days of Morning Dives at Crescent Bay and Shaw's Cove Laguna Beach (With Bonus Sea Turtle!)

Jen still had her rental gear after yesterday's trip to the oil rigs and with shore diving conditions looking better than we'd seen in months I wasn't about to not dive.

After all:



Jack and Andy met us just before dawn Sunday morning at the Crescent Bay parking loop. We'd become spoiled by all the midweek diving and I was a bit surprised to find several other groups already there forcing us to park back at the top of the loop.


It's always nice getting out at sunrise and getting to see the sun coming up under water.



Sure enough we had a good 25 ft of visibility and relatively low surge. And it was bloody spectacular!

Unfortunately we didn't spend as much time as we should have in this area since our goal was to try and find Deadman's Reef again.

Unfortunately we ended up missing it going too far north once we left Seal Rock. But on the plus side I can now say I've been down to 60 ft off Crescent...

(Better directions can seemingly be found here)


Coming up from that we ended up with a fairly significant surface swim.

We piled back into the vehicles and relocated over to Shaw's Cove and managed to snag reasonably close parking. I was excited to do the trench again in decent conditions since the last time was way back in July for my illustriuous if slightly chilly #100 Naked Dive.


The entrance had a lot of crap stirred up but things improved significantly at the arch.


And there were more fish in there than I was used to seeing.


Surge was low enough we were even able to take the small slot off to the left.


We often have to avoid this and turn back since things can get a bit surgy here but today we passed through and spent the rest of the dive playing around the canyons on the far side.


I even managed to find us an octopus on the way back. (Look really closely in the center of the picture and you can see his eye)

And because why show moderation when you can be diving Andy and I went back out the following morning.


We were back and Crescent and this time we went straight for Seal Rock and spent our time cruising around through the kelp.

Visibility had gone down from the day before but it was still on the better end of the scale. And just about as soon as we dropped down we saw a sea turtle motoring past!


I'd never seen one diving off Laguna and I had to do a double take before I believed what I was seeing.


After that we managed to see a seal, a sea lion,a horn shark, an octopus, and the usual assortment of fish and inverts. So pretty much everything you could ask for!


Visibility seems to be decreasing so for our second dive I decided to leave the camera behind. Rather than deal with moving the cars we decided to head back down to Crescent and then dive the southern end of the cove.

We ended up swimming all the way into Shaw's before turning back. It wasn't a bad dive but it was hard not to be a little disappointed after what we'd seen on the last few combined with the fact that visibility was probably back down around 10 ft and we were tossed around by surge the entire time.

I actually went back out to Crescent that afternoon again leaving the camera behind. Vis had gone down even further and I ended up swimming around the murk around Seal Rock though I did see a good 8 or so sea lions. And then Jack and I *tried* to do a night dive at Heisler only to find we'd been given rented a scuba tank that hadn't been filled. Doh.

Sadly this marked the end of my diving streak for at least a few days but I guess I can't complain too much considering I've gotten in 12 dives over the last 5 days.