There is a Phenomenon Surrounding Divers

If your sport is basketball you can pretty much play at any time and not have an increased risk associated. The rain could be pelting down and yes, you would get wet and you might have to watch your footing a bit more to avoid slipping, but it isn’t any more life- threatening to play basketball in the rain as it is to play with blue skies. Basketball does not require you to monitor the weather days before you go to the court to be sure it is a good b-ball day. The same can be said for the majority of sports. I have watched football games on TV being played in blizzards and the players seem to be having a blast. They slip and slide around a bit, but the game goes on without any more injuries than is normal for the sport. There is no such thing as frequent days where you cannot go play football or basketball because if you did you would put your life in jeopardy.

This is not the case with diving. Our fun is at the mercy of the ocean and, by extension, the weather. It would be nice if the ocean cooperated and was always flat, calm, and clear and if the weather was always mild, but that is not how it works. I would be willing to bet most divers have CDIP or some similar site bookmarked on their computer and that the weather channel website shows up frequently in their search history. We all know the routine of refreshing the CDIP page on a daily basis hoping the green seas that indicate seven to fourteen foot swells will somehow magically go back to that deep dark blue color we all love. Some days are better than others for diving. There are days when you just plain cannot dive because of the rough ocean and the inclement weather, and if you did get in the water you would be risking serious injury.

Sunday was one of those poor dive days. I had been watching the charts all week hoping green would become blue but I had no such luck. The dive was scheduled for Point Lobos, which is normally an absolutely gorgeous location. It is one of the favorites of Central and Northern California divers because it often has great visibility and the marine life tends to be huge because Point Lobos is a marine reserve. It was going to be a treat to be able to do a boat dive at Lobos because we could dive sites that are inaccessible from shore without a kayak. We arrived at the site and the water was green and murky inside Whalers Cove, which is where you enter the water and swim out to the boat which then takes you to locations around the perimeter of the reserve. On the outside of the cove waves were crashing against the rocks and sending spray into the air twice the height of the rock. Hoping the appearance of the ocean was deceiving and we would descend into some calm, we all swam out to the boat and rode around to Blue Fish Cove. In the past month or so there have been a number of videos of the four Giant Pacific Octopuses who have taken up residency in Blue Fish, and so we were all quite hopeful we would have a run-in with one. Members of the group were starting to turn as green as the ocean with the rocking of the boat so we jumped in almost immediately after the boat anchored. The depths were calmer than the surface and the visibility was about fifteen feet, but the life seemed to have fled the rocking seas. We saw a number of jellyfish, a monstrous cabezon, and a few pretty nudibranch but nothing like the normal menagerie of Lobos. It was a chilly forty-minute dive and then we found ourselves back on the boat. 

Despite these conditions, Sunday was great and I believe everyone left happy. We had a fun group of divers, a helpful boat crew, and we were able to get in safely, and that is all it takes. It is thrilling to have an amazing dive day but there is a phenomenon surrounding divers and that is this: we like to be in the water. The visibility can be terrible and the water freezing and the life nonexistent and we would still be happier in the water than out of it.