The Divers
Jonathan (Captain)
David
Allison
Rob

The Plan
The swell was non-existent. The wind waves were not present. The sun was shining. Rob, Allison, Jonathan, and I had nothing better to do than brave Point Piños! We took a look at the underwater maps on www.mocal-dir.com and planned to make a scooter run from shore to the 60' contour and then north-ish to the two large-ish pinnacles. After a little more braggadocio and posture to convince ourselves this was a great plan...we went to sleep for the night. Sunday morning, we got up and did a drive-by of Point Piños to make sure we were not completely insane. Conditions topside looked great, so we picked up our tanks and headed for the beach for real! As I drove up to the beach, I saw Rob and Allison staging their gear. Or should I say...I saw Rob staging their gear and Allison walking alongside for moral support?!?! Seriously though...the beach was treacherous and we all worked together to get our tables, doubles, scooters, and other gear down to the water's edge for the dive. Allison carried both her scooter and Rob's scooter down to the water. So, it all worked out in the end. It is just fun to give her a little friendly ribbing...and I would expect the same from her if I had wuss'd out on carrying my tanks!

After we finished staging our gear, we talked briefly about the rest of our plan. The big picture was to scooter out on the surface to deeper water, drop, and head west- northwest. We agreed on the surface plan and a run of no more than 15 minutes on the trigger so that we could save some trigger time for any contingencies. As we were all diving 32%, we planned for a maximum depth of 100' and a maximum run time of 90 minutes. The plan was to average 60' on the bottom and stay within MDL. We also planned to surface before we got too shallow...that way we could make sure we were scootering back into the correct cove! With the plan set, we jumped into our drysuits and made for the tables.

The Dive
No dive plan ever survives contact with the water. Or Jonathan. Or so I hear...anyway, we all got in our doubles and scrambled over the rocks at the entry. Jonathan stayed out of his doubles and ferried scooters out to Rob, Allison, and I, and then he got in his gear and joined us. We made for some quick gear checks and surface scooted out for about 7 minutes. We were near the end of the wash rocks and the ocean was rocking to the tune of 4-6' waves...so we decided to drop and scoot under it. We dropped and found ourselves in 30' of water and about 5' of green vis. No good! We set the compasses on 270 and headed west along the bottom. As we got farther out, the visibility started to open up, first 10', then 20'+. As the bottom dropped, we started encountering ridges and canyons made out of large rock formations and sand beds. Zooming along them on the scooters was very impressive! We continued west for several minutes and then began alternating west-northwest, north, and west along the route until we hit 90'. Oops...we overshot our planned depth a bit, but we were still well within our gas limits so we followed the 90' contour out to some really nice structure we happened to hit right at 15 minutes of trigger time.

We clipped off the scooters and kicked around. The first thing I noticed were all the nudis! Everywhere I looked there was a nudi or three or ten! It was amazing! I saw well over ten different kinds of nudis and I could distinguish that they were different. I even knew the names of a few of them. I saw Acanthodoris hudsoni, Cadlina flavomaculata, Dendronotus albus, Dirona albolineata, Flabellina trilineata, Limacia cockerelli, and Triopha catalinae. Rob and Allison, the slugsperts they are found several more, including Dendronotus frondosus, Rostanga pulchra, and Dialula sandiegensis. I might have seen these...but I don't think I did. They even found this little tiny one that they haven't positively identified yet. It might be a slug range extension...who knew slugs could be so exciting? There was a noticable current running south. If you were close to the structure and stopped kicking, you would immediately start drifting with the current. It was easy to kick against near the bottom, but Jonathan said it was quite exciting if you got much higher off the rocks...he estimated it was somewhere around 1-2 knots. Once our time out on the site was up, we pulled out the scooters again and made our way south and east. On our way back in, we stumbled across the pinnacle structure we had planned to dive, so we were not far off our general plan! The ride in was uneventful until we hit a pretty constant 30' bottom depth. Jonathan signalled that we should all go up and look around. I felt like shooting a bag, as I was unsure of exactly where we were...plus I hadn't shot a bag in a long time.  The bag shoot went well...until the bag hit Jonathan in the chest on the way up and he decided to deflate it. I felt the line go slack and knew what had happened...so I just packed it up. While I was packing up the bag, several young sea lions started dive bombing us. It was incredible! By the time we stopped watching them, Jonathan had already gone to the surface, taken a look, and figured out which way we needed to go. So, we set off in that direction for a few more minutes. At one point, all of us were moving backwards on the scooters due to the heavy surge that had picked up during our dive!

The Deco
The deco was uneventful and occurred along the bottom. Once we were shallower than 30', we surfaced to make sure we were in the right area. We came up right next to all the big wash rocks, and finished the dive with a surface scoot in. It was quite exciting, as the waves were big enough to make the scooter ride in a roller coaster ride! Lunch was at that old standby: Turtle Bay.