Rockaway Beach

Fun end of day dive at Rockaway. Viz cleared up at depth. 2 adorable otco on the deep reef, sailfin sculpin, nudi galore and a war-bonnet out in the open in all his glory!

Great first cold water dive for a new diver that joined us today! Lots of crabs, nudibranchs and flounder.

Low tide start with the buoy at <10 feet depth, rock reef was found at 30 feet. Lots of crab shell remnants, but no octopus found!

Two dives at low tide here, which made for an interesting experience! Visibility was QUITE terrible (<5 ft) through Norrander's Reef (the main structure, West end starting at 35'), with no clearing up even on the East & deepest end at about 50'. At 0' and -2' tidal exchanges, the buoy basically started at 4' and 2' depth, respectively 😅

But my goodness is this sight incredible -- even with the crappiest viz in a while, we saw TONS of nudis (at least 6 different species), few painted greenlings, one brown rockfish, few shrimp, bunch of tiny hermit crabs. White-lined dirona pretty-in-pink, cockscomb, few ring-spotted Dorid, tons of baby opalescent nudis, plenty of sea lemons, etc., a few species I've seen in Greg Jansen's book but need to look up their names :)

Dirona albolineata, northern leopard dorid, Monterey dorid, Hermissenda sp., noble sea lemon, three lined aeolid, barnacle eating dorid, nanaimo dorid, Cadlina sp., Dendronotus albus, Coryphella sp., orange and white tipped nudibranch. lingcod, painted greenling, tubesnout, pile perch, striped seaperch, kelp greenling, fried egg jelly, sea gooseberry, ochre star, mottled star, blood star, armpit blood star, zooanthids, giant plumose anemone, hydroids, kelp, saragassum, yellow branching sponge, red rock crab, decorated crab, pygmy rock crab, stiletto shrimp, dock shrimp, barnacles, channeled top snail

all photos taken with an iphone 16 in a Divevolk Platinum housing with macro +8 lens.