http://www.rogercarlsonphotography.com/gallery2/v/2007SoCal/20070502_vets_park/
Foreshadowing. Noun.
To present an indication or a suggestion of beforehand; presage. A sign of great literature.


Here's the Wave Height plot from the Santa Monica Bay buoy on Wednesday 5/2 at 11pm. We entered the water at about 9PM, I marked that on the chart.



Last Wednesday, Scott Geitler talked me into doing a night dive at Veteran's Park in Redondo Beach. It's a fun dive, a great muck dive with lots of interesting stuff at night. I used to do it a lot about 10 years ago, but only about 4 times since then. Vets fanatics will think I'm crazy, particularly because I live so close to it. My boat diving friends think that 4 is way too much.

I do recall enough about Vets to check the weather on the way in. Outer waters had a gale warning, inner waters had a small craft warning, due to wind offshore. But once there, conditions looked great, so we suited up and got in.



Water was a little milky shallow, but vis seemed good, 20 feet or more, better than I expected with algae blooms and red tide in the neighborhood. At depth, vis was quite good, I could see Scott's lights pretty far off. We both got pretty cold, water was in the low 50's. Scott had forgotten to zip his outermost wetsuit. I had forgotten to buy a new wetsuit in 5 or 10 years.

We saw the usual cast of characters, including a few sarcastic fringeheads, a small thornback ray, and even a small cluster of squid eggs. I left all those fine subjects to Scott and the backscatter and did what I could with the easier stuff.

On the way out, we found the sand shifting pretty strongly even though we were still in about 20 feet of water. We surfaced to find that the wind and swell had reached Redondo while we'd been diving. We were pretty well out, but we were still fighting surf and some whitewater.

Scott clipped his camera off to himself, and that gave us time to ride through a few cycles. There were definitely some bigger models coming in, but it wasn't worth sticking around to find the perfect point in the pattern. Nothing really to do but go for it.

We got stuffed.

I remember one good wave grabbing me, and I remember curling up around my camera and hanging on. I had to crawl up the beach. I can't remember having to crawl out like that.

Scott came out after I did. He was also crawling. We took stock, he had lost a fin, and we looked around for it, but eventually gave up and walked up.

We hit the showers on the way up the stairs, and I gave up after a few minutes. There was just too much sand, the beach shower was doing nothing.

Here's some of the sand I took home with me, just some of the runoff on the side of the driveway:



At least we got out. I'd do it again.

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