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.
