Lindsay and I have now done a total of three dives in Monterey. Two dives at Breakwater, two dives at McAbee beach.
The second Breakwater dive was with my Dad, and I think it was pretty great. We saw a small octopus, a bunch of great kelp, sanddabs, and the list goes on. Here is another quick video (note that I wouldn’t claim these are amazing videos but I record video for the sake of the memories, then try to cut them down into short-ish watchable chunks).
McAbee beach was a new experience. We (Lindsay and I) ended up parking downtown Monterey on a Sunday, so the streets were full of tourists, but there we were getting our gear setup in the middle of the street.
The dive itself was nice, but shallow. Reading about McAbee it turns out that in general it’s a pretty shallow dive, unless you swim out quite a ways (which we did, but not far enough). One thing that I think made the dive 100% worth it though, was a seal that swam with us for a few minutes (see: video). Lindsay was a tiny bit on the nervous side that it was going to eat us, but it ended up just swimming around us and playing with our fins for a few minutes. It’s pretty amazing to have such an animal just come right up to you and touch you. Having never dove with dolphins or any other “friendly” or curious animal like this in the past it was a pretty great experience.
We are going to do this dive again, but next time swim out past the kelp to where we need to be. If look around on the internet for dive reports from McAbee it looks like it’s not uncommon to see 2+ seals together, and honestly I’d LOVE to just sit and watch seals swim around me for an hour. We’ll see!