This night dive was supposed to take place with Alan at the Cut. However, his primary light failed, so he canceled. Fortunately, Mihai decided to come along, so I still got to dive albeit with some extra issues!
There was some plague of lighting problems as Mihai's UK light also had problems on the dive. It would turn off, and he'd have to smack it to get it going again. This happened 3 times. I found out later that this was a loaner light, since his real UK light was off being repaired for the same problem. I had thought the UK series of lights were pretty good, and I'm sure they are. However, I've seen problems with both Mihai and Jason in their use of these lights. Maybe just bad luck though.
A further problem was car trouble. I had borrowed a car to go out since I was originally going with just Alan. When I got the car back, it wouldn't start anymore! What a pain. At least it waited until I got back to the garage to quit, so that wasn't so bad.
Mihai had problems not only with his light, but also with his fins. He had put on thicker thinsulate booties so he couldn't get his fins off his feet. Eventually with a lot of tugging, I got them off, but ended up falling over too. One of his dry gloves popped off just before we entered the water, too. The low tide made the entry kind of bad since there were a lot of slick rocks with sharp barnacles. I had cut my suit boot on something like that before, and was very leery of walking on them. I think I got away ok this time, with no punctures.
The dive itself was good. We ended up exploring the rock reef that Jason and I dove the previous Sunday. The octopus we found in the hollow log was home which was awesome. It was low tide, so the log was right under us when we entered the water. To find the log, we just walked down to the change-house on the east side of the beach, walked down the stone stairs, entered the water directly south of the big tree with the rope on it, and just went south from there. I was pretty surprised to see it so quickly, though. I had to revise my identification of the octopus. It was a giant pacific octopus, not a red pacific octopus. I got a good look at its eye, and it did not have the three knobby "eyelashes" that distinguish a red pacific octopus. He certainly looked peaceful sleeping there. How he slept with me shining a 21 watt HID light in his face, I don't know!
There was not as much new life as I had expected might be out at night. There were many coonstripe shrimp, and some really huge ones too. Maybe 5 inches long, the biggest I've seen. There were lots of the yellow rimmed nudibranchs, but not a lot of fish. There was a decent buffalo sculpin, and quite a few cool flounders. Oh and again lots of red rock crabs nearer the shore on the rocks at the end of the dive.
It was a very shallow dive due to the low tide, so it ended up being quite long, 40 minutes. The average depth was only 7 meters, and the water temperature was 8 degrees. It was a pretty mild night too, air temperature wise.
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