BUGGY Diving Report

I've concluded you have to be a little bit loopy to go diving for lobster on the annual Peace trip. Up front, you have to figure on laying out more than $400 for a trip that starts and ends with at least a 6 1/2 hour drive. In between, you spend 3 days with up to 30 usually male divers in cramped quarters on a pitching boat with heads (boat speak for "bathroom") only slightly larger than your average broom closet. You're constantly wet so you're sleeping on a rubber mattress, sometimes shared. To actually get any sleep, you have to be able to ignore the noise of generators, air compressors, and engines going 24 hours a day. On top of all that, there are no guarantees you'll find what you're after. You have to hope for lots of luck if you want any chance of bringing home some lobsters.

If you're only Lucky, the lobsters will be there when you are. Sometimes they are, sometimes not. The 3-day trip preceding ours came back with 21 lobsters total; they weren't very Lucky.

If the bugs are where you are and you're Really Lucky, they will be concentrated in shallow waters near the shore break where the air in your tank seems to last forever. That's also where you'll find low to no vis, carpets of urchins, swaying eel grass that gives me vertigo just remembering it, and sudden opportunities to bodysurf in full SCUBA.

Finally, if the bugs are in shallow where you are and you're REALLY Really Lucky, the weather will be good enough to let you get to Santa Rosa. Of the four Northern Channel Islands, Santa Rosa is the best for bugs. It lies farther from the coast than the other lobster infested islands which means it is visited less frequently. As a result, the bugs tend to be a little bigger and a little bit dumber. Santa Rosa also offers some of the ugliest underwater scenery in all of southern California.

Assumming you get into the bugs, you'll get a chance to grab a few. This usually involves spotting their antenna poking out of a dark hole. Once spotted, you jam your hand in after it without hesitating over what else might be in there. Most often, the bug is only sharing space with lots of urchins. Occasionally, it'll be a moray eel.

As I said, loopy. So it shouldn't be any surprise that Gary Baumoel never has any trouble finding enough Redwood Empire Diver members and friends to jump at the chance to join the three-day trip aboard the Peace each October. For 1996, the group included Gary Baumoel, Darryl Burgess, Charles Dollwet, Phil Manix, Mike Mendosa, Steve Mope, Dave Tryan, Ken Weise, John Witchey, Art Zadina, and yours truly.

And we came up REALLY Really Lucky; the bugs were there, they were up shallow, and the weather turned out to be on our side. The Peace got us out to the south side of Santa Rosa from the start. We got into bugs on the first dive and didn't leave the island until the end of day three.

Day one: 5 dives plus a night dive. A sixth day dive was forfeit due to gale force winds that looked to cancel the night dive and, very probably, any thoughts of staying at Santa Rosa the next day. When the wind died down around 8PM, almost everybody was out of commission due to beer or wine during dinner. Only Art Zadina, John Witchey, and two divers from the Las Vegas group made that final dive of day one. It was the only dive of the trip that didn't produce any lobster at all.

Day two: 6 dives plus a night dive. Lots of current, lots of surge, lots of bugs.

Day three: 3 dives and a 5 hour boat ride back to port. The last dive of the day was, by general consensus, the best of the trip.

Total take over 3-days: 123 lobster. The Redwood Empire crew was by far the most productive with Mike Mendosa predictably leading the way. His 7 pounder was the largest on the boat as was the huge sack full of lobster he hauled away at the end of the trip. Ken Weise came in a distant 2nd with 17 bugs over 3 days and Art Zadina took a total of 9. The rest of us got a few each and, in the end, everyone went home with at least 2.

We also brought home memories of fun diving. Not easy diving and not pretty diving but high-energy, physical diving that was a lot of fun. That's the reason those of us who have done this trip always seem to sign-up again. Crazy though we might be, we're not stupid. Honest!

{norcadiver@sonic.net}