Pepper Park - Dive Report 9/7/09

[cyberfed]

Well our massive group that we expected to turn out this morning dwindled a bit but we still had a good turn out.

Gaby, myself, Michelle, Carsten left dayo around 9:15 in the morning to head down. We had arranged to meet up with Dan and his girlfriend Tiffany at Pepper Park. We arrive there and started making our dive preparations. It was HOT outside, like bigtime! We geared up and made the short walk from the parking lot to the ocean. Once in the water we swam out a few hundred yards and dropped down. Depths were a meager 10-15 feet with visibility on the poor side, about 15 feet. You had to get up close to the bottom to hunt for lobster. As soon as we dropped down Gaby spotted a lobster, but we quickly saw that it was clearly too small. A short while later she found other one, this one was a baby, about 3 inches long from head to tail! It was soooo cute! I caught it and brought it over to Tiffany to take a picture of it, I think he slipped out of my hand before she got a good pic though :( he was really neat.

We continued on, Gaby myself and Tiffany in one team, Dan and Michelle as another. We did not find any lobster or even seen more :( we still had fun checking out the ledges and coasting with the surge. You really didn't have to kick much which was nice.

We managed an amazing 2.5+ hour dive, I came up with 1700psig still in my cylinder, we were more tired than anything else.

We surfaced to see that we were a good half mile off shore. It was a looooooooooong swim back. Talk about a workout!

Carsten missed the first dive due to an issue with his BC, he got it resolved while we did our dive. Then Michelle and him did a second dive while Gaby and I fired up the BBQ, by the time they surfaced food was just about ready and we all sat down to a meal and chatted about the day.

All in all it was a lot of fun, we had a good time regardless of no lobster. Next time though we plan to use kayaks to avoid that killer swim back to shore :)

I hope you guys had as much fun as I did!! Lets do it again soon! :icon_super:

[Kberg]

Nice write up, and a 2.5 hour dive...well damn! :icon_super:

Sorry to bail this morning, I didn't get any better as the day went on though so unfortunately it was the right thing to do.

Sounds like you guys had fun, hope to be there for the next lobster hunt.

[Jeremy]

Looks like a fun trip! You had one hell of a weekend! I'd take the next couple of days off work to relax :eek:

[Metaldector]

To see how your dive went. I found the Pepper Park area to be void of interest in past years. If you want a nice dive with lots of reef, cracks, ledges, go south of the inlet to the Colored Beach and dive off of that. I spent a summer there treasure diving and found a lot of lobsters and little treasure. It's about 15 minutes from where you were by car. Just get to the other side of the inlet and dive towards the ocean. Make a right on the shore drive and cruise down there a way and you'll come to several beach parking areas. If I remember correctly, we'd park in the third beach parking area. You only have to go out about 100 feet to start finding the reef. Vis is never great along the coast until you get south of Stuart.:icon_super:

[cyberfed]

Thanks man that sounds good I will definitely setup a trip to explore the area you mentioned! I had heard good things about Pepper Park for lobster so we figured we would give it a try. I had fun regardless of lobster..a day on the beach is better than any day on land! :)