GoodToGo

 Finally I was able to participate in a club dive. As much as I dive it seems I just can't make club dive day available. Today, even after dropouts for a foul weather forecast we wound up with 10 divers on 3 boats. The wind was whipping pretty good out of the NW but it had just enough offshore component to keep the seas reasonable on the near shore sites. After some shuffling of the crew lineup we got away from the dock about 9:30. The initial plan going thru the pass on a swift outgoing tide was to start at the LOSS Pontoon. Running down-surf was an short easy trip to the LP but the water still looked turbid from the outflow so we pressed on down the beach to E Barge. Probably that was a good idea, the water looked better here and I marked a good show of fish on the approach. This turned out to be a nice dive with negligible current, 74deg water temp and moderately good vis at 15' or so. I guess the flounder are waiting for the Nov 1 tournament to begin collecting up on the near shore sites. Trigger fish of better than legal size were in abundance, but initially I wasn't seeing the fish that were showing on the bottom machine on arrival. I'm not sure how long it takes for a grouper to get from 15" to 22" but when that time has elapsed there are going to be a lot more nice grouper around. There was a school of 50 or more that I could see that were hanging around on the sand up-current of the wreck. There were quite a few ARS mixed in above the grouper and schools of nice size Spanish Mackerel on top of the stack. After arriving back on deck the buzz seemed to be that all had a nice dive. Since the wx was cooperating by holding at 2'-3' seas we decided to head out a little further to one of the spans. There were more people braving the winds than I had expected and most sites were taken but we were able to slip in between visitors on span 12. I love diving these big bridges because there is always the potential to see something exciting and even the mundane of the gobies and spade fish are still interesting to me. I was doing a little exploring on the up current side, checking out the big school of AJ to see if any would qualify for the team but none made the cut. Most all had a little more heft than Duncan's, but none were nearly as tall. I went a little beyond visual range from the bridge to check out a shadow on the bottom. It was my little Goliath buddie. I have played hide and seek with this grouper on the bridge several times in the past month or so, but hadn't seen him for a few times. I guess he has decided to give up the bridge to the divers while they are down and probably returns when we leave. I took a couple of tour groups out to have a look, maybe someone took his picture. After the dive, the trip back in was tugboat speed into the chop and gave us time for visiting and planning for the next trip. I spent a little while searching for my PBJ to no avail, it was still in the kitchen on the chopping block. When the tanks were filled, boats and gear washed, fish cleaned, then I was hungry. The few of us that stopped in at #1 Chinese were able to solve the hunger issue in pretty short order. All in all another successful dive trip. Let's do it again. bob