First Night Dive

Last Saturday night, on a weekend trip to Himalaya Bay, I went along on a night dive to Cowry Cove. This was a fairly shallow dive (30' - 35') along a cliff wall with 6 other divers, from a Zodiak style boat.

I used the UK eLed C8 I picked up from the Dive Shop, and was very pleased with the amount of light it produces. While it was a full moon weekend, overcast skies pretty much denied us any benefit of moonlight we might have otherwise gotten.

I expected a bit of nervousness on the first night dive, but between diving with a good group and having a good light, I really didn't feel much different in that regard from the daytime dives. We had a lot of hopes of seeing a decent amount of octopus, but I didn't hear of anyone on the dive that spotted any. The DM figured the area had been recently hit by a fishing boat, as it was also pretty sparse on crabs and lobsters.

We surfaced to a light rain falling, which made the air feel cooler than the app. 85 degree water. Visibility in the water suffered a bit from the recent hurricane which thrashed the Guaymas/San Carlos area, but still wasn't too bad.

All in all, a good experience for a first night dive. It would have been nice to have seen more of the nocturnal creatures we expected, but I certainly can't complain about a relaxed, peaceful dive. I figured getting back to camp smiling, and looking forward to another night dive in the future, is a darned good indication things went well.

Glad you had a good time. You must be on vacation?
My buddy and I were so excited to dive we did two dives before it got dark then didn't have the desire to put wet wetsuits back on to do the night dive, decided to have dinner and margaritas instead. Next time we plan a night dive, we'll just be doing the night dives

It was a long weekend vacation. We left about 6 Friday morning, and got home around 8 Sunday evening.

Himalaya is only about a half-day drive south of Tucson. The Dive Shop has trips each weekend in May and October, with tanks available starting about 3 on Friday afternoon, up until noon on Sunday. They have a good stock of tanks down there, and a compressor system to keep them filled, so it's pretty much unlimited shore dives for the weekend, with the boats heading out to more distant dive sites throughout the day on Saturday, and a few times on Sunday morning.

It's remote conditions; camping on the beach and no commercial businesses within at least 15 to 25 miles. The times we've gone down there, we usually end up spending pretty much all day in our rashguards, and so far, the water has always been warm enough that we haven't bothered with a wetsuit.

Sometime this next week, I'll have a video up on Youtube of the diving. It's not high-quality video; I don't have the super-duper camera and lighting set-up that gives professional results, but my little Canon digital camera and UW case allows me to take up to 30 seconds of video at a time (it's an older Canon, but it works). In some ways, I think using the camera with ambient lighting is nice, as it allows people to see diving the way it looks without artificial lighting.

I didn't bother taking the camera on the night dive. I figured I would just focus on relaxing and enjoying the dive, rather than trying to take pictures, too.

I reeeeealy like night diving. If I lived near the coast I'd probably do about half wreck dives and half night dives. As it is now, I go along with whatever the captain decides.

Sounds like fun Hoomi, I didn't know where people in the desert would go to do weekend diving.
Camping on the beach, diving on the beach, packing in, packing out. Very fun!