While I was having fun with sea lions in La Paz, reports of local conditions in Laguna Beach were showing a major improvement in both surf and visibility. This is kind of expected for this time of  year, but we hadn't had real good conditions for quite a while, so I had great expectations when I came back. Unfortunately I had to fly to the East coast for work and so I missed out on a full week of diving, frustrated to read all the good reports of 30ft+ viz in all our coves. So on Sunday, I was ready to go diving! 

Back in August I went diving Crescent and aborted the dive after 20 minutes as it sucked like really big times. My tank had been sitting in my garage with 2,000lbs of air which I thought would be enough for a quick dive later on. So this Sunday morning, I left with my 3/4 full tank and my dive plan was to spend 30 minutes in the kelp patch at Crescent, looking for the soupfin shark or other cool creatures to videotape. 

I arrived at Crescent circle at about 9am and got the best parking spot ever (I'm getting good at it). There was a lot of divers around so I got help zipping my suit up, I'm not much of a solo diver gearing up I guess. 

I got in the water easy. There was a few 3ft waves, nothing really worrisome. As I started swimming towards the kelp patch, the sun start popping out. We've had a nasty fog/marine layer all week, so it was quite encouraging to finally see the sun and some blue sky. This is California, god dammit, that's what we pay for! 

I dropped down in the kelp and viz was stellar. Probably in excess of 40ft. I found an octopus right when I landed, a couple of California scorpion fish, a colony of abalone, mostly adults and a few bugs. I also spotted a small school of white sea bass (I got the cool South Coast Divers folks to ID them for me).  No luck with the soupfin.  

I spent most of the dive on my back shooting sunbursts in the kelp. Sun did show up in force about halfway through my planned dive, so I decided to spend a little more time down. 

Photo setting were a no brainer, I started at Tv 1/125s at the beginning of the dive and cranked up to 1/640s when the sun showed up. Here again, I shot no flash, even for close-ups, just using my two 800 lumens video lights. I did experiment with sunburst + kelp close-up with video lighting. 

It was so good that I ended surfacing at the border of the kelp patch with about 200psi (~15 bars). The swim back to shore was not too bad mostly on my back, but as I was closing in, the surf picked up a notch. I put my reg back in my mouth and ducked under a few 3-footers. After a few minutes of this, waiting for the lull in the wave pattern, it started to become difficult to suck air out of my reg... I realized that I had sucked my tank dry! I made it safely to the beach with about zero PSI in my tank. Luckily there was plenty of air on the beach to breath from. The good news is that now I know my gauge is properly calibrated...    

         

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