So I'm single for a week with my buddy gone to Little Cayman for some warm water excitement and after a Saturday of video games and playing with the cat, I decided to meet the South Orange County Dive Club peeps for a Sunday morning dive in Laguna Beach.

Cress Street was selected for its proximity to "public" bathrooms and also because it happens to be a pretty darn cool dive spot!

I love Shaw's Cove, but Cress beats it in variety. It's however, like most dive spot the SOCDC extreme divers seem to enjoy, a bloody long swim to the reef structures. And with the thriving kelp forest patches all around, it's definitely not a pleasant surface swim... Especially with a drysuit and a camera that seems to have a knack for getting entangled. It's a pretty good workout  though...

We went down at the "third" reef. There seem to be like 10 of them all the way down to 90 feet, a couple of miles off the coast. I was in no shape to swim that far anyway, so the third reef was fine by me!

The viz was slighlty murky but a good 20ft which was rather surprising since all reports from the day before indicated that it was more in the "it sucks" range than that! Good for us!

The reef was great. I had never seen so many lobsters congregating in numbers in every cracks. It seems they know it's not lobster season any more. They also probably know that Laguna is now a Marine Sanctuary and they are safe.

At a turn of a wall, after going to a nice swimthrough, I realized I was shooting 1,600 ISO. Not a good thing. That's the problem with 1. getting old and 2. staying out of the water for too long. One get un-used to diving and photography. At least this time I did not forget my fins or my diffuser... Anyway, fiddling with the controls of my camera with my 7mm urchin-proof gloves, I lost track of the group and ended by myself. I never wear a compass, but I usually have one in my drysuit side pocket in case I get lost in an unknown reef (= everwhere not Shaw's Cove), so after spending a few minutes looking around and snaping a few picture of sunbursts in the kelp forest, I decided to head back to the beach using the compass. Good thing we all checked the heading before we dove. And in case you wondered, no, I did not surface to look for my buddies because they did not surface either, it was the agreement: you get lost, you're by yourself. Fine by me. As long as I don't end up face to face with a great white, I think I can handle a little bit of solo diving...

On the way back, I found a small baby ray, a big octopus, more lobsters, a maimed sheepcrab, a halibut that took off right under me and the biggest badass bat ray I have ever seen! I had surfaced to verify I was heading to the right beach and was back under at around 10ft as my ears were not poping when I saw that giant resting on the ocean floor. It must have been 6 ft! I surface to blow my nose and get my ears to pop and went back down with no problem. I landed a few feet from the monster which must have startled it because after looking at me funny while I was readying my camera for the money-shot, it took off in a flury of sand! I wont make the cover of Sport Diver Magazine again... Too bad...

Anyway, for my exit back to the beach, I managed to hit the only rock in a 500 yard perimeter and almost ended up playing the turtle on my back, but made it safely. It would have looked really bad to be topped by a 2ft wave!

Since the water was slightly murky, there was a few good macro opportunities (shutter priority, 1/80s, forced flash) and some cool sunburst (P was enough). Color balance in post-processing gave the pictures a new life. I shot less than 40 pictures on that 48 minute dive. I guess I was busy trying to keep up with everybody in the first part of the dive and busy trying to find my way back in the second part... But now, I know that I want to dive that site again! Why did everybody hide it from me?