Night Dive Wimp

As agreed the night before at the club meeting, I arrived in Monterey early and checked out the Breakwater and Monastery with an eye toward a Friday night dive. Conditions weren't exceptional and it didn't take me long to make a mental note to pass on a night dive. With my duty done, I was looking forward to a nice dinner and early sack time. Better luck next time, right?

With a hearty meal under my belt, Dave and I are leaving the parking lot when we spot a familiar, beatup International Harvester towing an inflatable and heading south on Hwy 1. If that's Jock, we have the third of three people who'd expressed interest in a night dive. At the very least, we've got to catch up with him and give him our underwhelming report on conditions. Otherwise, he might be looking for us long after we've gone to bed.

A few minutes later, we've caught up with him and we're standing in the parking lot off the south end of Monastery Beach. Jock quickly realizes I'm not really excited about the breakwater or Monastery so he jumps in with an enthusiastic suggestion that we checkout Garrapata a few miles to the south. He's dove there lots (10 years ago!) and it's spectacular. Though he's never done a night dive there, he's sure it'll be perfect. And the climb down the cliffs is really not too bad, he says. It's hard to put a damper on Jock's enthusiasm. And, if I'd already pretty much decided to skip diving Monastery and, for sure, the Breakwater, we certainly have to time to go and check it out, right? I mean what's a little walk in the woods at 9:30 PM? Like Jock says, where's your sense of adventure? So off we go.

Now I have never been to Garrapata. I'd read about it in California Diving News and it sounds like a great place to dive. The entry is off a rock shelf; you simply giant stride in. To get back out, you try to time the swells to deposit you on high ground. There's no beach nearby. The entry is 1/4 mile DOWN a trial that meanders through brush (mostly poison oak) before it changes to solid rock. The solid rock provides great traction which is good because the trail, if you want to call it that, is steep. In a couple of places, you need to leap from rock to rock. Once you get to the bottom, you could kind of make out some offshore rocks, you could heard the swells sloshing between them, and there were some sea lions barking nearby. Kind of eerie. Of course, it was WAY TOO DARK to actually see anything even with a 20,000 candle power dive light. The idea of humping dive gear down and then up that trail really lit me up (NOT!). Then there was the prospect of giant striding into the unseen and unknown. Boy was MY sense of adventure piqued.

Dave and I started wondering rather loudly to ourselves about the joys of hauling weight belts, tanks, and sundry dive toys up and down that cliff. After a few minutes of our moaning and groaning, Jock is wondering aloud about how the trail got so steep in the past 10 years. We commiserate for awhile about how we'd really like to jump in here, that it's obviously a great dive location, and how we should return during daylight hours. Then the three of us wimp out and head to Monastery.

After the prospect of a night dive at Garrapata, Monastery was a cake walk. We hit the water by 10:30 PM, found that the visibility wasn't great, and we missed the most interesting part of the reef. But one byproduct of the limited visibility was the most spectacular bioluminescence I've eve witnessed. This made the dive and all the preceding effort more than worthwhile. In fact, the whole evening really was an enjoyable adventure (really, no kidding).

My apologizes to Jock. I hate being a bridle for someone's enthusiasm (though I doubt there are many who could keep up with Jock in this regard). And I swear that I'll be returning to Garrapata in the very near future to try a daytime dive.

{norcadiver@sonic.net}