Pre-Big Swell Report

Knowing the swell was coming in big time starting late last week, I wanted to get in on the last reasonable dive-able day. Quick shore dive in Monterey which was more protected than anything on the Pebble side of the peninsula. Visibility was already degraded from the couple days previous dive that I did in Pebble. Hazy brown water and not a fish in site. I covered A LOT of ground swimming to find fish in the mid column. Surprisingly they were all balled up in one location over a shelf. Saw several +- 28" lings, but decided not to shoot any since I'm on the hunt for something in the 30"+ range. I did find one of the fish I was looking for for DOTY - a decent sized (14.5") chuckle head in about 40 fow. Wanted to get the party started so placed one through the gil plates. Unfortunately, my nice wood Herranen 80 with sweet double flopper got stuck far into a deep cave and I had to cut it loose and use my back up gun (pathos 60) - (ANYONE HAVE A ~36" THREADED EURO SHAFT FOR ME?). On this trip I was thinking I might need more range so I dove with my omer cayman 75. Thankfully I did because that Chucklehead was definitely testing it's range. Glad I still remembered how to aim with this cheaper gun. I though I saw a large dark ling run into a crack in all the commotion so I went back down to explore. Finally, I see a big eye and the large edge of a gill plate. It definitely appeared to be the big ling, but upon shooting and wrestling it out, it was a massive Cabezon. The pig was certainly round in the belly and came in at 22.5" (my PB). I found 2 octopus inside it upon cleaning. I stuck around to find a big ling but no luck. The waves were definitely popping upon exiting the water which made it one of my less fond of exit memories (washer machine), but at least I didn't loose any gear or fish. I want to look at my gopro footage but my laptop charger died on Thanksgiving so I didn't get to look at it yet. Here is a picture post dive!



P.s. my wife found an old Gopro 3 over the weekend while searching through her boxes, so might be fun to wear a couple one dive and make a good video! Looking forward to this 16 ft swell ( :-X ??? ) dying down because the water is brown and I was told visibility is really bad.