Date: 8/17/05

Time: approx. 8 pm

Location: South of Fringehead City, La Jolla Shores, CA

Dive Time: 45 mins

Surf: 2 ft.

Viz in Shallows: 1-2 ft.

Viz at Depth: 10-15 ft.

Max Depth: 100 ft.

Critters: Horn sharks, Smoothhound Shark, numerous octos, nudibranches, large Sheepcrabs, Blacksmith Fish.

The 5 of us kicked out to the drop down spot, determined by a new toy I got just that day: a fathometer; when it read 50 ft., we dropped down. Viz was quite good once we got past the muck at 20 ft. Merrianne had a brief problem with her new Halogen light, it came unbuckled from its place on her tank and after some fiddling about, she decided to just clip it to her front and we proceeded on with the dive.

We followed the contour of the bottom down to about 90 ft. and headed South, peering into all the usual nooks and crannies in the wall along the way.

The first set of critters we came across in abundance were Sheepcrab. They were everywhere…….a pair here, a pair there. Large females with slightly smaller males.

Some of them obviously in the business of ensuring species propagation and were none too pleased at having humans with lights poking around their little dens. It had to have been mating season. Never seen so many out on one night.

A couple squid eggs here and there, but not the abundance seen at Secret Garden.

Then, the octos: a juvenile here and a juvenile there, plus a HUGE adult in a hole in the wall, just south of Fringehead City, spotted by the every sharp eyes of our ‘navigator extraordinaire,’ Kathy.

Then, as we reached the turn around point in air, we came up over the edge of the canyon and began heading NE.

We hadn’t gone too far along the sandy bottom, when we came across some more Sheepcrab and an adult Horn Shark, about 2 ft. in length. He cruised about, seemingly attracted by our lights until he finally got spooked and zoomed off, after wriggingly around under my stomach for a bit.

Then, about 10 minutes later, we came across something going on on the sand, we weren’t sure what. All we knew was we stumbled across two Horn Sharks and a 2 ft. Smoothound Shark, swimming in a circle. They appeared startled when they saw us and the Smoothound took off like a bullet, evading my attempts to follow him.

When I returned to our original position, the rest of the gang was inspecting the two Horn Sharks, who reacted predictably enough, by cruising around us for a bit, then suddenly feeling startled or confined by all these divers, took off like a shot. One zoomed under Greg and wriggled around under his stomach for a while, startling him quite badly, while the other one did the same thing, but this time to me, somehow got entangled in my fathometer, which I had careless allowed fall out of its pocket in my vest. I didn’t realize this at the time and wondered why it was wriggling around under me for so long. Finally, it dawned on me that he was tangled in something and I rose up a bit to give him room to untangle himself, which he finally did, shooting a dirty look at me, I swear, as he zoomed off into the dark.

As a critique to myself and no one else, I think in the future, I’m not going to approach Horns quite so closely, because of this tendency of theirs, in their panic, to escape under the divers , I need to give them more room to exit as well as not make them feel ‘penned in.’ We want to keep the impact on these animals to a minimum upon contact with them. Causing them stress is not good for them or us.

Anyway, shortly after that, we were under the surf and it was time to surface, right at the point we entered. More superb navigation by our navigator Kathy B.