Watching the wave model flatten out, Derek and Shawn decided to put together a last minute midweek dive at Lobos early Jully.
Kelp was thicker than either could remember. Initial thoughts were to conserve enough air for the return, as neither of us were interested in trying to crawl that.
We did two DPV dives, each a little over 60 minutes with a max depth of 80 ft.
First dive followed Middle Reef out and then were intrigued by structure - explorations took us much further east than anticipated, wound up surfacing amongst the rocks at the entry to Moss Cove. Took us a minute to get our bearing and plot a course home. Luckily there was almost no swell or wave action, as normally this would have been a precarious surf area to enter.
Second dive we veered to the left and quickly rounded the point into Bluefish Cove. Retraced our steps back to the ramp from there.
Viz was pretty poor in Whalers itself, 10' - 15'. Opened up quite a bit once you got down to depth. Not only was Whaler's packed with kelp, but we had quite a bit of plankton in the water column, felt a bit like driving through a snowstorm.
No ling or cabezon spotted, but plenty of sheepshead, rockfish and blues. Oddly we were the only dive team on site that day but plenty of interested school kids topside from the Monterey Bay Aquarium program.
Here's a short clip of us exploring some very nice structure just east of Middle Reef on our first dive:
https://gopro.com/v/e5c22b62-c952-49ca-bae8-5fb304a000c8