Those santa anas wrecked my yard and pool all week but man the vis was EPIC. I was doing dives every chance I got, during my lunch break, after work and on any days I had off. The bugs suffered severely in woody's Mutiny Bag, I took my biggest shoredive limits to date, nothing huge like the monsters you guys get but I got a couple in the 3-4 pound range. The bugs kept moving deeper and deeper and I had to resort to digging under rocks and caves. A big seal scared the crap out of me as it zoomed just out of my vision and then circled around and came right up to me, after that it would follow me around trying to find stray reefies to eat. He helped me by spooking out two fat bugs one time though. It took me almost 2.5 hours to scratch a limit, the big problem was I had torn a hole in my bag and everytime I'd try to count the bugs I'd have four, this happened twice before I saw the hole and knotted it up. Getting a limit in a high traffic area might have taken a while but man it was worth it, my family and parents were stoked. I dragged my boat down to another reef and had really good vis and shot some video of the big BSB milling about, I counted at least 12 separate fish in one area it was amazing.
This past week I dragged my kayak out to one of oaks reefs and I spent 5 magical hours there. Visibility was 30-40' in the morning, I tied off the yak onto a kelp bed and could clearly see all the reef fish chasing each other while I pulled on my gear. As I dropped I swam in enormous schools of opaleye, sargo and found a colony of big kelp bass and even saw a legit ten pounder zip away. I saw some giant sheephead, 20-30 lbs and small bugs. I pulled the trigger only 3 times, I took a big goat for my inlaws and a small one for some fish stuffed lobster as well as a nice kelp bass for dinner. On the edges there were gigantic schools of cuda, in the hundreds and they patrolled the spanish mackerel. I looked all over for seabass but didn't see any, it didn't matter because I was having so much fun. The last time I was out there I spent four hours and thought I'd be back in two. This time it would be five and I was cramping up from drinking all my water. The first three hours were fantastic, then slowly the cold wind picked up as did the swell and pretty soon the vis dropped to 10' and I knew it was time to leave.
I checked out the reef later in the week, as I suspected the swell made the water dirty and green again :(. I'm sure some of the other oaks reefs got the same effect as the swell was pretty decent the last few days. I'm glad to have made it out when I did, 6 straight days of diving and I started getting sick so I slept in and drank a lot of vitamin c and tumeric. Watch out for that flu, it knocked out several of my coworkers for 3 weeks straight. btw the bug pix is one at my work that is mid molting, I'll show the entire video when I'm done editing it.