Point Lobos State Preserve: Filling my wetsuit.

This is the part I’ve been dreading for about 10 years, ever since I started hiking around the amazing Point Lobos. All of those previous visits were naturally on wooded trails that kept you dry and above the water, but I always wanted to see what was below the waterline too.

The last time I was in a wetsuit was in Florida in the 72° water of one of those beautiful springs that release pure water back to the surface. And I thought 72° was cold.

Here in Point Lobos State Preserve the water is a startling 59°. So here I am, letting that cold Carmel Bay water trickle down my back and I’m thinking, damn, this is a far cry from my last little adventure. On that outing a few weeks ago, I was stumbling through sand in the Mojave Desert, the air was 106° and the humidity was about 13%. Now the humidity inside my wetsuit is currently a complete 100%.

This is the kind of experiential whiplash I’ve come to expect as I cover California gathering posts for this space; stifling desert heat to painfully cold ocean water.

Photo courtesy ZZC.

So here we are, on the shoreline at Whalers Cove, wrapped in wetsuits with camera in hand, heading out to sea, to see what we could see.

I say we, as the park requires anyone snorkeling (or scuba diving or kayaking for that matter) to enter the water in pairs. I’m venturing forth with our good friend (and Olympic-class French interpreter) Stephanie, who agreed to complete the ‘pair’ I needed to get into the water.

Photo courtesy of ZZC

The whole point of this first cold water encounter was (1) to see if a wetsuit would keep me comfortable in these cold, northern California waters (it did) (2) to see if just snorkeling (as opposed to a full Scuba rig) was enough to make the effort worthwhile (it was, somewhat) and (3) try out an underwater housing I haven’t used before (worked really well).

So I suited up with the kit I rented from Monterey Bay Scuba while Stephanie, who has her own gear and is a certified diver, got suited up nearby, for our swim in and among the kelp.

After a few minutes, I was comfortable in my 5/4 wetsuit, even without the head cover and gloves; the gloves can make the camera housing a little clunky to use, and the supplied head cover was a little too tight for, ummm, shall we say, my full-sized knoggin. Besides, we were mostly rolling around on the sunlit surface anyway, which was lucky, as the sunlight can often be dimmed by the ever-present fog along the Monterey coast.

Turns out the sunlight was a great help getting the pictures I did manage to get, (mainly the kelp through filtered sunlight) in spite of my flailing about with the very buoyant 5/4 wetsuit, although I had to cheat a little bit in editing to get something useful, as the seawater was a little cloudy here inside the cove.

The cove is pretty choked with Giant Kelp (Macrocystis Pyrifera), so it took a little bit of effort to figure out how to navigate in the treetops of the growth; turns out the easiest thing to do is lie on your back and kind of glide over the top of the amber-colored leaves and stems.

We stayed in the water a little over an hour and that was about enough. Not because it got cold, but because I found out what I needed to: the 5/4 wetsuit kept me comfortable, the camera housing worked really well, and to get some images of something other then kelp, one probably has to swim out of the cove toward open water to find a little bit clearer water and the chance to get some shots of some other aquatic life.

My camera and housing were made for the Nikon 1 series of cameras, which Nikon stopped making about 10 years ago, after the cellphone pretty much wiped out the ‘point and shoot’ camera market. Now, only the cool kids use these excellent point and shoot (mirrorless, by the way) cameras. And their interchangeable lenses.

The housing and the camera were bought on eBay from retailers in Japan. The housing had never been used and the little Nikon Series 1 J4 camera produced a roughly 5300 x 3400, 12-bit RAW image that gave me the resolution I wanted to make the trip worthwhile.

Because I had made reservations for us ahead of time, we were guaranteed a parking spot, even after the rangers post the ‘Parking Lot Full’ sign at the entrance to the park. Once the parking is full at the preserve, which happens soon after opening, you need to either park along busy Hwy 1 or take a shuttle into the park.

Bottom line, if you’re not diving/kayaking and just visiting the park, get here early.

So it turns out my instincts were right; there’s plenty to see under the shoreline, and we just scratched the surface of what’s out there (pun intended). And yes, there’s a little bit of a tickle charging up the wetsuit, but it’s a minor nuisance readily offset by seeing this park from below the waterline.

Google Maps

Photo factor: There are a few things here to mention. The turbidity of the water was a little more then I expected, but I managed to clean that up in Lightroom using the ‘dehaze’ filter, which was a pleasant surprise. I set the camera to RAW and Auto and pretty much let it do its thing. I was way too busy trying to manage my position with the buoyant wetsuit to fiddle with the controls. I set the camera lens to wide and placed it in the housing; there is a knob to roll the zoom, with an adapter you place on the lens, but it didn’t quite fit and I reasoned that I wasn’t going to be zooming too much anyway. I’ll also set the camera’s back LCD display to the brightest setting next time, as the overhead daylight washed out the display, making it difficult to compose a shot.

Photo Courtesy ZZC

Photo courtesy ZZC