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Photo Dive Report: The Red Tide in Shaw's Cove

Published on 2010-06-19 22:38:46

  

That was supposed to be a great day of diving. It was not. Not really.

The arctic temperatures of the Pacific seem to be gone now that Summer is just around the corner, however we are now faced with another disaster for the diving community: RED TIDE!

Red tide is a natural phenomenom caused by microscopic algae that sudendly decide to reproduce at a very unusual rate causing a bloom. Red tide is not really red in Laguna Beach, it was more like a brownish yellowish greenish pea soup. It's visible from the surface and appears in brownish bands all around the coast, from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

Anyway, after checking the surf in Shaw's Cove (see our maps on GoogleMaps) and witnessing a few retarded divers trying to enter the water backwards with their fins on and got pounded by a few two-footers, we decided to ignore the warnings of all the divers coming back with reports of 3 ft visibility and went diving anyway.

I have more than a hundred dives at Shaw's and I can navigate the reef pretty well. However, the red tide makes it a whole other story! We dropped down slightly before the what I thought was the entrance to the archway (aka the crevice). I never found it. We swam South in poor conditions, viz was probably no more than a foot!

So what to do in these conditions again? Macro? Yes, we can try, but then we'd better be ready for some serious backscatter removal because the bloom puts a hell of a lot of particles in the water!

On our way, my buddy managed to spot a baby eel with dozens of shrimps around it. I still don't know how she managed that...Took a few shots. One came out slightly blur, the other one was sharp but the eel was cut. We swam to what I think was turn around rock. En route I shot a couple of sea fans close ups. That was the perfect day for textures so I carried on with extreme close ups of sea stars and tube worms. And that was about it... Nothing else much to shoot.

We reached the end of the reef and decided to turn around. I start going through a canyon and realized that nobody was following me. I went back and found no one. I could hear them breath but couldn't locate them in the thickness of the pea soup! I ended the dive solo (yes, this is what we agreed to do if we ever get separated in Shaw's). I followed the canyon until I found the reef and then followed the reef, keeping it on the left. I'm terrible at navigation. I proved it again that day. After a few minutes swimming with the reef on my left, I ended up in sand. Far too early to be back on the beach. I looked around but recognized nothing. I quickly concluded that I was lost... I decided to ascend and spent 3 minutes at 15ft "in the blue", or should I say "in the yellow". I must have picked up the surge because I ended up surfacing way the hell out, almost in Crescent Bay! I swam  all the way back to Shaw's on the surface, dropping down only at the end when I reached the entrance to the crevice. On the beach, three of my four dive buddies were already out. Apparently we lost the fourth one after about 10 seconds into the dive when he decided that it was not worth it...

After such an adventurous dive, it was high time for a burger or two at the Laguna Sea Dwellers BBQ! Of course I shot a panoramic of the event!                                               

                         
 
  

 

 

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