Butterfly House

Valerie and Mark wanted to brush the cobwebs off their dive gear, and I was interested in trying a new dive site, so we collectively decided to dive Butterfly House a couple of Saturdays ago. According to CA Diving News, Butterfly House is an intermediate to advanced dive site. What makes it so challenging is its exposed position along the Carmel coastline, making it prone to surge, and crashing waves. More importantly, the entry can be quite challenging: the way down to the beach is winding and steep. Weighted down with 40 extra lbs of dive gear, this can make it quite challenging just to make it into the water. But Butterfly House is also known as one of the best shore dives in Monterey due its pristine wildlife, and untouched kelp forest. So we thought it worth risking, despite the less than ideal conditions.

Swells were averaging 6-8 feet that day (not good), but the cove looked deceptively quiet. Contrary to what we had read, there was plenty of close proximity parking along the beach to gear up nearby. And when we saw two divers coming out of the water, and exclaiming that the diving was great, we had to give it a try.

The beach was covered a foot deep in rubbery, decomposing kelp. Walking on it was like walking on a bouncy castle and I must have fallen over a couple of times. The cove itself was filled with hidden rocks to trip you up for the first few steps. The water itself like miso soup, literally -it was cloudy with fragments of decomposing kelp in the water. The surge pushed us around 3 feet in either direction, which made it even harder to swim through.

We decided to descend as soon as we reached the mouth of the cove due to the presence of dense kelp floating on the surface and found ourselves in approximately 15 feet of water. We were told that the best scenery was between 50-90 feet of water, so we booked it at a 240 degree heading. It took us probably another good 15 minutes before we got to the promised land. In the meantime, we saw some of the largest fish I had ever seen in Monterey on average. The perch everywhere else in Monterey are less than 1 foot long, but the perch at Butterfly House were around 2 feet long.

• Dive #187: Butterfly HouseDepth: ??? (I wasn't wearing a computer, but I was told it was 50 feet)
• Time: ??? (wasn't wearing a computer)
• Visibility: 20+'Dive Buddies: Mark, Valerie
• Weight worn: 17 lbs total (1 lb on ankles, 10 on weight belt, 6 in BCD). I definitely felt overweighted, and I also wanted to turtle when I did my safety stop. Need to adjust my weight belt positioning.
• School of narrow fish (pipe fish?)
• 3' Ling Cod
• 2' Cabezon
• White dorid nudibranch the size of my face
• Courting perch pairs almost 2 feet across in size