Barbary Coast Dive Club Newsletter
p4
Mack Truck Ling - by Dan Schwartz
Nick and I paddled out off the boat ramp at Stillwater Cove (Monterey) on Sunday with a couple of tanks each. While outside it was hot and sunny, we were told at Aquarius from H., "Don't expect much. It was pretty rough, surgy, and the ocean needs two complete days to settle down. It's only been a day, maybe a day and a half."
We first checked out Monastery. For me it looked barely doable, with some whitecaps up off the point. Nick's assessment,"I'd like to see my next birthday if it's all right with you." That's how we ended up at Pebble Beach.
At first viz looked bad, really bad, then as we got further out it looked like things cleared up as I could see a few feet down the kelpstalks. The weird thing was I couldn't paddle my boat left. It just didn't want to go. Nick caught up with me and said the same thing. Pretty strong cove current I guessed. We used the wind going out and thought coming back in might be a bear. But of course, we'd worry about that later.
Nick went in with spear gun, and dropped. I was suppose to follow, but at the last second realized my dry suit hose wasn't attached. It took a while to get it attached, basically I had get out of my BC and switched the BC hose with the dry suit hose, and never found Nick on the bottom. Usually when I have stupid equipment problems, it means one thing, something really cool is going to happen on the dive. This fell right into that that mold. I .. uh. got attacked, well maybe not attacked but definitely had a ling come at me.
I was down in a crevice between two pinnacles shooting a colony of Christmas tree worms when this big dark object shoots across me, a few feet forward, and duck under the pinnacle. At first I thought Harbor Seal, because of the size, then I realized no, it was too dark and had spots so it wasn't a sea lion, then caught the back end of the fish and said, "Holy shit, Nick's gonna need a float to pull that Mack truck in." It was one of those sizes like Curt's got on the homepage. Magnified in water, pretty impressive. Looked about 4 and half feet long and a mouth about two feet wide. It sat on the ground, mouth open, pretty impressive teeth too, and then I saw its mate swim behind it. Oh, I thought, must have been disturbing something.
So I pulled back and rattled off a few shots. I was hoping to get something near it to give it perspective. It's kinda like redwoods, without a person or something it tough for the viewer to get a an idea of just how big it really is. Then, the sucker started swimming towards me. I'm like, "What the?" It wasn't swimming fast so I wasn't worried or anything, but it did have some teeth and I really didn't want any punctures in my dry suit. So I put my flipper in its face, kinda kicked it in the lips, not hard, and it didn't startle it, it just sat down and kept looking at me.
I swam off to find Nick but I couldn't find him. When I surfaced I was couple of hundred yard off the boats. It didn't seem like I did much kicking to be off that far. That water movement thing again, oh also it was cold, even in a drysuit which is rare for me, maybe 48 degrees. I saw a Harbor Seal below me, looked at my guagae and saw I had about 500 psi to play with, unfortuantely when I dropped the Harber Seal didn't come back to play. On the next dive we tried to find the spot but I couldn't get my bearings on the place. With the current and all who knows where I was when I first dropped. Real nice area though, behind the washrocks, to the left, out a bit.
updated 5/15/05