new reef starting to come to life ...
On Saturday I finally got a chance to check out a new man-made reef that was installed at a local site a few months ago. Even though it's just a few miles from my house I don't dive there very often ... mostly because it's shallow for a loooong way out, and until the new reef went in there wasn't much to see. This time I took my scooter and towed my buddy out, thinking to clip off the scoot once we were on the reef. But once out there we had more current than expected, so we stayed on the scooter and let it do all the work.
The reefs are three long "fingers" of piled boulders with some large cement "jackstraws" laying over the top (maybe 100 feet long by 3 feet in diameter). Given the current, this site will be primo in two or three years ... once the plumose anemones have established themselves and attracted all the critters to come live there. For now it's pretty much bare rock ... but since the surrounding sea floor is littered with crabs, the octopus have apparently decided the boulders make great dens.
We were scootering over one "finger" when my dive buddy started flashing her light furiously and pointing down directly below us. Looking down I realized that what I'd at first taken for a boulder wasn't ... it was a massive octopus, apparently sleeping off a happy meal.
Poor thing woke up once my strobes started firing in its face ...
Just to give you an idea of its size, the ling cod in the foreground in this pic is about two feet long ...
After just a few shots, the octo came to its senses enough to slither under a rock and disappear.
So off we went ... heading for the eel grass in the shallows, where we found hundreds of hooded nudibranchs merrily makin' bacon. Here's a lovely spotted one playing "bite my ass" with a more normally, translucent specimen ...
Overall a very nice dive ... max depth 83 feet, total run time 68 minutes. The scoot battery finally died about 50 feet from our exit. Considering it spent most of the dive towing two of us around, I'm surprised it lasted that long ...
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
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Originally Posted by LCF
