Andrea & Catalina Island

My friend and roommate from college visited this last weekend. We went to Catalina Island on Friday and we had a blast. Everything we planned on doing didn't work out as planned but we had a wonderful time together.

We were planning on doing two dives at casino point but we only did one. On the first dive Andrea had trouble with her weight belt and it came off. When her weight belt came off she went to the surface and I followed her up. We came up in the middle of a kelp forest and we got stuck in kelp three times on the surface. It was a real pain making it back to the steps that I wasn't feeling up to going again.

The diving at casino point is amazing. It is difficult going up and down the stairs in gear but not too bad. The visibility underwater was about 20' and I wasn't cold!! I would love to do this dive again with more people that is knowledgeable about the area and has a compass (compasses on the island are rented separately)!!

We decided to go snorkeling a Lovers Cove, which lasted for five minutes. A couple was getting out of the water and gave a bag of fish food that they didn't use. We were in knee deep water and stuck our faces underwater and I was so excited about the visibility (even better than casino point but no scuba diving allowed). There were a lot of Calico Bass and Garibaldi (orange) along with kelp forests.

Andrea screamed and I was shocked to find out that she got bitten by a fish. She had the fish food bag in her left hand the fish swallowed the bag and her hand. Andrea was standing in knee deep water with her hand scraped and bleeding. We exited the water and decided no more water sports for the day. We returned the wetsuits to the scuba shop and had her hand cleaned by a fireman paramedic that was in the store. He said that it happens occasionally and he thought it was because of her wedding ringing (which luckly didn't come off) but she thinks it was the food because she always scuba dives with her ring.

We decided that it was not a good day to try water sports!! We stopped after two strikes instead of waiting for the third strike. We went to Descanso Beach, relaxed and fell asleep.

It was a perfect day and it felt like we were on a vacation a lot further than my house.