TuTuTu 6/30

[YellowEye]

Hi
ScubaJess and I went to Three Tree yesterday.

I don't have photos to share yet (my son is dominating my lightroom machine) but thought I'd share some highlights for those of you thinking of going out. Will post photos later.

The purpose of the dive was to try to see and photograph squids laying eggs, based on some recent sightings. It was near high tide (we splashed 8:30ish) yet the current was surprisingly running pretty hard on the surface, towards the point. So we dropped down pretty early, 50' south of the antler house. We were hoping to cover a lot of ground anyway.

Viz was better than expected, though there were large "snowflakes" in the water column that cleared up at around 30-40'. Surprisingly, the current was still running pretty hard even on the bottom. We kicked into it for most of the dive.

The most noticeable thing we saw the first part of the dive were lots of egg yolk jellies! Fairly large and beautiful ones. We'd drift along with them in the current, taking photos, and then kick back up into the current. We did a lot of swimming into the current, yet I was surprised we never made it far down the beach. At one point I though we were past the reef, and then the bowling ball pyramid showed up!

Sightings along the way included a friendly ratfish, a huge seapen with striped nudis, a very large lemon dorid, quite a few seastars (false ochres, leathers), stiletto shrimp, kelp isopod, octos, and a stubby.

One thing I was surprised at was the number of burrowing seacucumbers we saw on the dive. I don't recall seeing so many burrowing seacucumbers at this site before. Maybe I missed them, but perhaps the lack of sunflower stars is contributing to a population boom?

Towards the end of the dive, ScubaJess found one squid egg at 20' on a piece of kelp. Moments later, we saw a market squid, which darted off after one out-of-focus photo. Then we found a small nest. It looks like it was still in the process of being built up. But no other squid were to be found.

So, it may not be too late to catch some more squid in the next couple days. Maybe when the moon is higher in the sky at night?

[YellowEye]

Hi
Here were some of the snaps

Fun!

[ScubaJess]

Those turned out really cool! Great job! That was fun swimming along with them, watching them dance in the water column.

[KeithBoll]

Thanks yellow eye, for the recap. Appreciate you sharing the story of the dive. Just went to Redondo today (the 4th) with my son-in-law, Karl. We were glad to see that the viz has improved there, as well!