White Water Diving

Mark and I were at Point Lobos last Saturday (a week after a diver drowned at thepark). We saw a gigantic 2 foot+ long copper rockfish surrounded by 4-5 smaller copper rockfish. My guessis that it was a female holding court. Have you ever seen this behavior?Also, the dive was very unusual in that we had 60-80 foot viz that day. We took advantage by swimming out much further than we normally do. And got ourselves into a little trouble. We ended up on the other side of these wash rocks. Because we were halfway through our air supply, I decided that we should take a shortcut through the wash rocks. Boy, was that a mistake. We slowly went from a depth of 75 feet to a narrow surge channel only 6 feet shallow. As I slowly pulled myself through the channel, hand over hand, fighting to slow my breath, I noticed that the place was bursting with life -- the only limiting factor was the real estate on the rocks. Giant green anemones were crowding each other out like in some absinthe laced dream. As I held onto the bull kelp, I thought to myself - this is really nice scenery, I wish I weren't scared to death so I could appreciate it more. After Mark and I surfaced and changed, we climbed to the top of the hill to see what we had just swum through. The channel we swam through was the gnarliest stretch in the wash rocks. The white wash never subsided once. One would never have thought adiver could make it through.As I said, there was a guy who got tangled in the kelp at Point Lobos last weekend, and drowned. Before thislast Saturday, I never thought I could ever get into such a panicked state and drown like that guy. Well,even a few minutes after the surge channel, I was still out of breath, and felt I couldn't get enoughair from my regulator. As we were crawling over the kelp, still panting for breath, I can easily imaginespitting out the regulator and losing it. Of course, my state of mind was nowhere near that level of panic,but I can see how such a situation could arise.