After the fantastic dive of the day before in Shaw's Cove, I decided to join the SOCDC  morning dive group again this Saturday and I did not regret it!

We decided to dive Cress St/Mountain St, which has become one of my favorite spot to dive here in Laguna Beach. Every time I dive it, there's something new. I am now almost comfortable to dive it solo and I might give it a try tomorrow if the conditions (and my condition) hold.

The dive started with a long surface swim as usual. On the way, someone spotted a bat ray. I decided to go down to see if it would stay still for the shot. It did but I was way unprepared, and by the time I was ready to press the trigger it was long gone. I surfaced with the group and resumed the long swim to the outer reef. We dropped down in the kelp, visibility was around 15ft, rather hazy. One of my buddies was wearing his dive light hanging down and that makes a fantastic beacon to follow in the darkness of the kelp forest. It also made butterflies in my eyes every time I looked straight at it. Because of that guiding light, I was able to not end up by myself as usual. That's progress!

We started the dive with a big angry sheep crab. I was too slow and couldn't get a head shot. Plus it was really angry and was already running around in defensive position. No need to waste air chasing it and potentially losing the rest of the group of originally 6 divers. Shortly after that, we got separated. I remained with 2 other divers, one of them facing accumulated technical problems with a dead computer, a dead go-pro and a misleading compass. As he was our self-proclaimed navigator, we ended-up wandering in the reef, not really knowing where we were, which is not a big deal for me as I never know anyway. Except in Shaw's Cove. Most of the time.

We spotted a few large abalones (not rocks this time, I have pictures to prove it), a couple of small rays, hundreds of lobsters, a sculpin and a cute little horn sharks until we hit the jackpot and ended up in Leopard Shark City!

I had heard that divers had had various encounters with Leopard Sharks around this area but I had never been lucky to see any in my previous dives. Until today. We counted maybe a dozen, of various sizes, the largest probably around 6ft (almost 2m). Most were sitting down, relaxing in their canyon, others where swimming around a little. That was awesome!

On my way back, I signaled that I would head back to the beach by myself underwater, the two others having decided to surface-swim back. On my way a giant bat ray, probably a 6ft wingspan, crossed my path! I tried to video it but the visibility in this area was not that great and the damn animal was fast! Well it was a shark dive, not bat-ray city after all!

Shooting technique for the day included shooting raw+JPEG. I ended up salvaging one of the overexposed kelp sunburst in RAW. The rest lived well with just JPEG and usual color/backscatter/filter correction. Tv 1/160 no flash in the kelp, Tv 1/100 forced flash auto-macro for the sharks mugshots. I shot a short video of the sharks as well. It is composed of two clips, the first one was shot with manual white balance in the sand, the second in auto. I switch to auto because as I was shooting the first clip, it seemed very red. It ended up actually looking way better than the second one... Oh well. Did not have time to look for a cool 30 second open source music this time, so you'll get just an open source soundscape... Enjoy!

Back on the beach, we re-united with two other divers of our group who saw a couple of leopard sharks too. We waited for the last one and saw him walking on the beach probably half a mile away! There were some serious navigation skills at work today!                    

And the video!