really cool!  great story and great fish.

Hey guys!  Hope everyone has been staying warm and dry with all the crazy weather.  I saw on NWS there was a "storm warning" (bigger than gale warning) last weekend, I don't know what that looks like right on the coast but it must have been nuts.

That said, what do you guys think is the earliest date you have ever gone diving after the winter storms are done rolling through?  Or does it not matter to you (like, do you just keep an eye on the swell and go if it has been down for a week or so)?

I'm really itching to make a trip to Monterey but these storms look to have churned up the water pretty good lately.  Any ideas welcome!

Solid haul!  I was thinking of taking a friend to SWS for some uni diving, but it didn't look like there was too much in your video footage.  Is there much uni there?

Nicely done both on the fish and staying on time!  My wife has unfortunately learned to add 2 hours to when i say I will be home from HMB...  I blame it on the pumpkin festival traffic 

I loooove shiso leaf!  Such a unique fresh citrusy/spicy flavor.  I will try that for sure next time!!!

For the grilled uni, I did not scoop out the 5 segments of uni from the shell.  I pulled out the mouth, broke up the shell to expose a larger hole (just barely exposing the tips of the uni segments), which allowed me to reach in with a small plastic spoon and gently separate the membrane/kelp bits from the uni and then just rinse out with plenty of water (clean ocean water would be best to rinse but I only had fresh water).

ODDbod made a spicy thai sauce (thai chile, garlic, lime juice, fish sauce) which we usually use for grilled/fried fish.  But it was equally good in the uni.  just a teaspoon is all you need since the uni has such a delicate flavor.  Grilling the uni actually made it very neutral tasting, it almost tastes like nothing... but a really fun way to eat it!

Maybe oddbod can post up the thai sauce recipe.

The purple ones had more flavor than the big red ones. The red ones seemed watery but sweeter.  There were plenty of big purple ones, some as big as the red ones.  We grilled the small ones since we didn't know how those would turn out on the grill. 

My friend and I went up to Ocean Cove last weekend to test the waters!  It was my friend's first time up there and I think he had a great time because he was not interested in diving at first but now he is!  This is great because I don't have any close friends who are remotely interested in freediving, but I may have my first convert now!

First day got practically skunked save for a greenling which we shared for lunch.  Later that afternoon I went diving while he spotted me from the yak and got a haul of ab and uni right near the cliff where the houses are in the cove.  There was a ton of kelp there a month ago but it's almost all gone now.  The uni were fat and delicious.  I "did my part" and got a whole bunch of large purple ones too, and they were delicious as well.  I'm not sure why they don't have more commercial value, they seemed as good if not better than the red/black ones.  I also took my Riffe E90 down and speared my first fish ever!!!  I was very excited and am getting a lot more comfortable with all the gear, breathing up, spotting fish, marking spots, learning my comfort zone, etc.  It was quite a feast that night and got us ready for the next day.

Next day we went out around 7:30AM and got to work.  Right away I got a decent size ling, but then nothing for the next hour.  My battery for the sonar also went kaput so we were fishing blind.  Luckily I remembered a spot from the day before that felt especially fishy and we immediately got several rockfish.  By 10:30 I was getting cold and we decided to drift one more time... and BOOM a small tug followed by what I thought was the fish getting totally wrapped in kelp.  I haven't felt a fish fight hard since a trip to Alaska 5 years ago, so I must have forgotten what a big ling feels like.  At the surface I see a beast swimming in the water and immediately know things are either going to go really well or really bad!  My friend missed with the net the first time but got it on the second and threw it in the yak!  The thrashing was intense and I had to trap him between the seat and my knees so I kneeled down on him while trying not to get bit.  Cut the gills, more wild thrashing, and success!  What a way to end our trip. 

It was a trip of many firsts for my friend (seeing what freediving was all about, eating abalone and uni straight from the water, and seeing his first ling cod).  He already asked me where he can get a diving wesuit

Credit to Kris for his Fii class, without his instruction I would have never learned how to dive and none of this would have been possible.