I was in the Monterey, California area and managed to do 2 dives at Lover's Point. Most divers in California use the sandy beaches as entry-points, but the low surf and soft sand in the cove made me climb down the more solid rock at the point to enter the water. Visibility near shore was a stirred-up 3-6'. I swam out on the surface to the giant kelp forest. At the shore end of the kelp bed, visibility was around 10' and it was pretty dark at the bottom (20' deep). There were schools of juvenile rockfish here. I swam out farther under the kelp and the visibility increased to about 20'. At the outer edge of the kelp bed the depth was about 35-40'. There were small pinnacles of rock sticking up from the sand. Many of them had patches of strawberry anemones and a few fish-eating anemones. There were more rockfish, small lingcod and lots of painted greenlings. The surge didn't let me take my usual camera-timer self-portraits so I didn't manage any diver-in-the-kelp photos. I didn't feel like climbing back up the steep rocks so I got out at the sandy beach. The surf was pretty small, but it made it pretty awkward to stagger through the sand out of the water without destroying my camera.
