Diving with Octos and Sixgill Shark
Jul. 23rd, 2025 05:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tiggymalvernI went diving at Redondo on Tuesday, with the plan to look for sixgill sharks. I had no real expectation of seeing them - they're around there, but you have to be lucky. They mostly stay way too deep, but in summer they sometimes come up into water shallow enough for recreational divers. But at those depths, you don't get a lot of time to hang out and look for them.
The visibility was terrible with so much plankton after all the sun we've had, but once we got below the plankton at around 30 or 40 feet, the very first thing we saw was a giant pacific octopus sitting out in the open - always a good start to a dive! Then when we got down to 90-100 feet where we looking for sixgills, there was a delightful little red octopus to entertain us. It touched a rockfish and scared itself!
And then after ten minutes, a sixgill shark came to check us out. It's dark down at those depths in summer, because all the plankton in the shallow water eats the light. It's one of the reasons you have to be lucky to see them - if it's more than 20 feet away, or you're not shining your light in the right direction, you'll never know it's there. So the shark has to want to interact - we're down there blowing bubbles and shining lights, and if they were shy, they'd never come near us. It's a very different shark experience than all my tropical shark dives, where you can see them a long way away and watch them come closer. With these guys, you know nothing, until you suddenly have all the shark right there in your face.
We only had a couple of minutes with the shark before we had to head back up into shallower water, but it was great to see one. Some people have looked a lot more often than I have and still never found one.
https://youtu.be/k-xJLkSildI
The visibility was terrible with so much plankton after all the sun we've had, but once we got below the plankton at around 30 or 40 feet, the very first thing we saw was a giant pacific octopus sitting out in the open - always a good start to a dive! Then when we got down to 90-100 feet where we looking for sixgills, there was a delightful little red octopus to entertain us. It touched a rockfish and scared itself!
And then after ten minutes, a sixgill shark came to check us out. It's dark down at those depths in summer, because all the plankton in the shallow water eats the light. It's one of the reasons you have to be lucky to see them - if it's more than 20 feet away, or you're not shining your light in the right direction, you'll never know it's there. So the shark has to want to interact - we're down there blowing bubbles and shining lights, and if they were shy, they'd never come near us. It's a very different shark experience than all my tropical shark dives, where you can see them a long way away and watch them come closer. With these guys, you know nothing, until you suddenly have all the shark right there in your face.
We only had a couple of minutes with the shark before we had to head back up into shallower water, but it was great to see one. Some people have looked a lot more often than I have and still never found one.
https://youtu.be/k-xJLkSildI
