Hi, I just posted this same set of questions over on the "Sticky Catalina Island" board, but this thread is much more up to date so I'm cross-posting here. Thanks in advance for any light you can shed. Actually I should have pointed out that the optimal day for us to do our day-trip to dive on Catalina would be Friday, Feb. 1. [Maybe that's significant, if the dive boats aren't running that day or something.] ///
My high school aged daughter and I are from the Washington, DC area and will be visiting Orange County for the final week of January. We are both PADI open water certified and love scuba, but she has only dived a few times and I've dived only a dozen times myself -- always in the warm Caribbean. We recently got dry suit certified in a short course (in a rock quarry with almost no visibility!) here in Virginia. Our rationale for this was that we want to spend a day diving in Catalina (preferably Friday, Feb. 1st) while in SoCal at the end of this month. So here come a flurry of questions...
1) From reading these boards and some other online sources, I'm starting to think we may not need to book ourselves on a boat dive at all; we can just take the ferry over to the island as early in the morning as possible, then dive the Casino Point Park from the shore, and we'll still get to see what we'd like to see -- namely kelp forest, pinnacles and lots of fish and other life. And it might be a lot less expensive than a boat dive, too. Thoughts on that? Since we just want this to be a 1-day experience -- preferably with two back-to-back dives, though -- would it make more sense to take the ferry to the island and then dive in the Casino Point Park? Or should we instead book ourselves onto a dive boat that leaves from the mainland (e.g. Long Beach?) and takes us to Catalina and then we dive off the boat? For that matter, is it even an option to take a scuba boat from the mainland in January? (One post on this board indicated that all the major dive boats are hauled out of the water for the entire month of January, so unavailable.)
2) We're still beginner divers, even though we got dry suit certified, so we really shouldn't do this diving alone. So we'd like to find an experienced divemaster or dive buddy at least (we would compensate them) to be our sherpa on this adventure. If we book ourselves on a boat dive, obviously this won't be a problem. But if we opt to just dive off the beach at Casino Point Park, then we'll need to find a divemaster or dive buddy. What advice can you give us about this?
3) We don't own our own drysuits (or wetsuits, for that matter). So we'll need to rent them from somewhere -- preferably on Catalina (or from the dive boat operation, if we go that route). Theoretically we could rent them from a shop on the mainland, I suppose, but then we would need to schlep them over to the island on the ferry (although, again, if we opted for a mainland-based dive boat tour, then carrying our drysuits aboard would presumably not be a hassle at all). Thoughts on this point?
4) That's it -- unless you can think of something else we should be considering.
THANKS!
Clint
