Best of Monterey, Worst of Monterey

4:45am dawns gawdawfulearly when you go to bed after 12. I’m just sayin’. James F’s float sprung a leak, so we had to take a field trip to Greg’s house late Friday night to get his float, and between that, John getting off work at 10, and having to figure out if we could fit James’ stuff in our car (no) and then packing his car (bah), it was a late night.

But we were off. This class was Advanced Open Water, with 4 students, 3 guys and a gal. Advanced class is basically the first dive of five different specialty courses, with mandatory navigation and deep. I think. Maybe mandatory boat? There used to be a mandatory night dive, but they nixed that awhile ago. Dive plan for Saturday was to do Peak Performance Buoyancy (PPB–where you learn not to smash critters on the sea floor or shoot to the surface like a missile-propelled grenade), then Navigation (can you swim a square with a compass?), and finally either Search and Recovery (there’s a weight belt out there, kids, go find it or you owe us one) or Night (ooo, dark! hope you’ve got your lights to see the octopi!).

For staff, it was myself and John as Divemasters, Nate and Shelly as Divemaster Candidates, and James and Ben as Instructors. James and I were going to take Nate and two of the students, and leave the other two to Ben, John and Shelly. Brilliant plan. We were all off to have fun, right?

Then James threw his back out putting on his BCD. He thought he’d be all right in a minute or two. Nope. Then he thought he’d be all right if he could just get into the water (no weight from the BCD). I told him to sit on his tailgate and move his legs like he was kicking. His expression? Priceless. You use your back muscles for a lot of things, apparently. Including deep breaths–he could only breathe shallowly, which isn’t so good for diving.

So he was left behind with copious amounts of ibuprofen, and students were rearranged. I got Nate and Shelly and two students, John got two students, and Ben watched us all. We went down to do our skills, Nate and Shelly each taking a student, and then Nate toured us all around. (By default, whoever looks the least comfortable, leads the tour–it’s good practice, and instills confidence in the leader that s/he can do it. And I was following right behind, no worries.)

We saw nothing, and had chunky viz. Lots of big particulate matter. However, it was beautiful day for diving–sun was out, it was warm, light breeze, very nice. The lack of wind and water movement meant the particulate matter just hung in the water column. Thus, sucky viz.

The second dive wasn’t much better. It was navigation, and the student’s had to swim lots of lines and squares and whatnot. Same plan as the first. The viz was, if possible, even worse. Like pea soup. Fun. And John and I were left behind to pull up the augers that we’d used to tie down all the guide lines. That’s not easy underwater. At least there wasn’t much to look at to distract us. Bah.

We went off to Fisherman’s Wharf for lunch, and crammed our gullets full of clam chowder. Mmmmm. Then back to do Search and Recovery. The viz was such that we’d nixed a night dive. However, by the time we got in the water, it was late, late afternoon. 6ish. And the light was coming down at such an angel that in the upper water column, we had beautiful rays of light lighting up all the pea soup. And in the lower water column, it was just dark. There was some minor confusion with the students (when we tell you to come down the anchor line, we mean come down the anchor line, not swim 25 feet away and sit there until someone finds you by freak happenstance), but eventually everyone did what they were supposed to do and found what they were supposed to find.

So, after 13 FREAKIN HOURS at the beach, we packed up and headed out. Some hot tubbing, gallons of water to drink and dinner later, and life was looking pretty good. Except for James and Ben being all tetchy with one another, which may have been partially due to James’ back. Poor guy. End of the day summation: beautiful day to be on the beach, and great diving if you don’t mind being able to see anything.

Sunday was the boat dives, so we got up at the not-quite-as-early hour of 6:30, and were at the docks by 7 to prep the students and ourselves. We headed down to Carmel, and did our first dive off of Pebble Beach. Yes, that Pebble Beach. There’s some good diving there. Anyways, it was a bit…choppy…on the way down, to say the least. I took dramamine the night before and that morning, and still ended up staring fixedly at the horizon for the second half of the trip down.

However, the dive was amazing. Beautiful 30-50 foot viz, nudibranchs out (we saw a San Diego dorid), kelp blooming, just lots of neat stuff. Our first dive down was the deep dive. I took Nate and the same two students, and had them do a “stupid human trick” at 88 feet–we demonstrate nitrogen narcosis by showing them how difficult stuff becomes at 88 feet.

I was a bit nervous, since the second-to-last time I did this dive, students got low on air and had to be taken to the surface on James’ and my octos, and James wasn’t there. New ground rule: when a student’s used up 1/3 of their tank, we’re heading up. No ifs, ands or buts. The dive is done. And we actually hit a decent amount of time underwater. All in all, it was definitely an awesome dive, despite the shortness.

At that point, some storm was sweeping into the Monterey area, and faster than predicted, so the boat people made the decision to head back into the bay before the second dive, hopefully resulting in less waves on the way in than their might be in an hour. We were glad they did–if it had been an hour worse, we’d probably have had more than 2 people feed the fish. Ugh. I stared fixedly, and basically refused to talk to anyone, and made it in safely.

The only exception came when John wiped the powdered donut powder from his hands on my drysuit, leaving white finger prints. I managed to get up, get a donut, and smear it all over his legs. Yes, we’re 6 like that. Good thing we love each other. (Side note: Diving does not remove powdered donut powder from drysuits. Bah.)

The second dive was the opposite of the first dive in many respects. We were diving in emerald green pea soup, with very short viz. I led my students around, with Shelly following close behind them. We saw some more nudibranchs, a huge anemone, and lots of other creatures on the rocks we were on, so long as we were within a foot or two of them. One of my students was not having a good dive–mask leaking, disoriented, just not having fun. So about the time we hit 20 minutes and found the anchor line, I called it good.

There was, however, one more obstacle. Stinging jellies. They get blown in on the wind (which we had) and they feed on the plankton that make the water so emerald (which it was). They’re actually very pretty–yellow mushroom tops, long red tentacles that sting, shorter clear ones that may or may not sting.

Last 4th of July, we went out, and there was pretty much a solid mass of them from the surface down to about 20 feet. This time, there were enough to cause problems, but not so many that you couldn’t dodge them. We still spent the safety stop whacking them away from one another. At the surface, while letting all the students get back on the boat, I realized that what I was holding was not my regulator, but was, in fact, a jelly. And I now had tentacles all over my gloves. Bah.

We made sure to rinse everyone off in fresh water–makes the singers fire–and made it back into harbor without incident. All in all, again, good diving out at Carmel but a crummy trip there and back, and good diving in the bay, but crummy viz.

Ah well, Monterey is never going to be like tropical diving, but it has it’s own rewards. Especially the teaching part.