Hi all,
Great forum! Jill and I will be in San Diego next week for an event and want to try some diving there. Can anyone recommend a dive shop or any locations that we should not miss while out there?
Here's a report on a fun week in San Diego:
We dove 5 tanks over 3 days.
I had tried to call and arrange for some dives with a dive master ahead of time but could not really get the shop to commit so Jill and I showed up at Aqua Tech Dive Center, a 5-star PADI shop:
on Tuesday morning and found them to be much more interested in lining things up when we were in person! We dove with their training coordinator, Anne Marie, on a shore dive at La Jolla Shores that afternoon after renting gear at the shop. La Jolla is a high-rent beach area just North of San Diego. Beautiful beach with a long swim in the surf until it drops into a hole. The beach slowly goes from 0 - ~30' before the hole. Sand dollar beds, California halibut and a ray. Once at the hole it drops more than you can dive and the fish are all there. We were just getting acclimated to ocean diving as Jill had never done it before so we just dipped under the thermocline to about 45' and headed back. A surface swim to the hole is what is normally done to see a lot more life, but as I said Jill was getting some great training from Anne Marie. Amazing and cheap authentic Mexican cafeteria across the street from the dive shop - line around the corner!
On Wednesday AM we dove 2 tanks off of a boat on the HMCS Yukon, an intentionally-sunk Canadian Destroyer in what is known as Wreck Alley, a group of these sunk to attract marine life and divers.
The dive shops in SD don't have their own boats, but use the same dive boat company, Dive Connection Inc:
and you can reserve spots with them online, without having to use a shop if you want to book ahead. You can rent tanks and weights from them to save you the trouble of lugging it down, but we chose to use the soft weights we rented from the shop instead of the traditional hard weights the boat had.
The Yukon wreck was really really great. I dove with another guy on the boat and did a few penetrations of the ship while Jill dove with her instructor Anne Marie again. Jill overcame some anxiety and really became a diver on these two dives. The wreck is on the sand at 100' on her side with the highest points at around 65 - 70'. It was sunk in 2000 and has a lot of life on it now. Some kelp, a few Spanish Shawls (brightly colored slug-like things) and lots of sea cucumbers, pink anemone, and white plume anemone, making Jill remark that it really has become a girly-colored ship. Lots of fish as well including several varieties of surfperch, treefish, senorita, kelp bass and several types of starfish including ochre stars. Jill also saw a monster giant sea bass. A California sea lion also stopped by the boat as we were on our surface interval.
Our final dives were 2 boat dives on Thursday morning. We dove a small reef plateau on the edge of the kelp forests called three fingers. Saw many of the same sea life. New ones included the colorful Garibaldi and sheepfish as well as a huge 26-armed sunflower star.
Dive Connections page of dive sites they go to on their boats:
All in all San Diego was great. It is cold compared to Hawaii and the Caribbean. In July we found it to be 52 degrees below the thermocline at around 30'. 7 mil wetsuits with hood and gloves. Life is not as abundant or colorful as the Caribbean, but it is different than you will have seen before. Because of the cool temps of the water, it make a great summer destination.
One more recommendation is Franko's series of dive fish identification cards and maps. The boat had the Yukon map and I've just ordered some for Hawaii. They also have Mexico and the Caribbean:
They are cheap, small and great for identifying marine life below or when you are back on the boat.
The city itself is awesome and we toured the Midway aircraft carrier and the Air and Space museum. We also had an great day and a half in Ensenada, Mexico. If you are in San Diego for any reason one thing not to miss is the Stone Brewery in Escondido. Great food and wonderful beer.