Why You Should Dive Catalina Island

If you're a scuba diver in Southern California, you've got to try diving Catalina Island at some point. The water is warm and clear and you have this opportunity to see huge schools of fish, giant black sea bass, superfin sharks, moray eels, spiny lobster, and so much more. This video is really intended to be a recap of my recent trip, but my hope is that it encourages you to get out there and see these things for yourself. So, enjoy! To dive Catalina, you've got to take a ferry out to the island. We took the 6.45am ferry, which unfortunately meant getting to the terminal at 5.45am, which meant waking up at like 4.45am. Oh no, I forgot to record the last Snapchat of when we started out at 5.45am. 5.45am! 4.45am! 4.45am! I can't talk, I'm so tired. So that was a little rough. We got off the ferry, walked to the dive site, and then set up our gear. We jumped in and the first thing I noticed was how clear the water was in Catalina compared to basically anywhere else on the mainland. Right off the bat, 30ft visibility, like 5-10ft of water, and huge, huge schools of fish. Just like so many kelp bass, maybe a school of 50 kelp bass. You can see the girbaldi from the surface actually before you even get in the water because they're so bright orange and the water is so clear you can just like look down and pick them out individually. I think what's really cool about Catalina is the fact that a lot of the island is this marine protected area and so not only is there a lot of fish, but they're also really curious in the divers and the snorkelers because they don't get fished. My buddy Adam was some sort of fish whisperer or something. I don't know what he was doing, but fish would just come like right up to his face and just kind of like stare at him. We had some huge, huge sheephead come and went and checked him out. The giant black sea bass, which is I believe an endangered species. I've never seen them anywhere other than Catalina. They were super abundant on this trip. They're just these like huge, massive 6-8ft, like 300 probably pound fish and they're completely unafraid of humans. You could probably get within touching distance. I did my best to keep my distance. You don't really want to spook them because you know they seem like they are like kind of slow and lazy, but they're so big that I could just imagine like if they did get spooked they might hit me or maybe there could be some injury, but in any case it was just awesome to be able to swim up to these huge, huge animals. So me and Adam, we did mostly scuba diving on this trip. We did four dives, three day dives, one night dive, ranging anywhere from you know 10 feet right near the surface all the way down to 75 feet. There's a couple wrecks kind of scattered around the dive park, which is kind of cool. I think they purposely sink boats and you can kind of swim under them, swim around them, and they're just kind of cool landmarks for you to find underwater if you're scuba diving, but I actually found that the most life was 30 feet and shallower, and so if you're a snorkeler or a free diver, I think you can actually see a lot of life maybe the same amount of life as a scuba diver, and it's really easy to get out there and start like snorkeling around. It's an experience that I would recommend for anybody that goes to Catalina Island. Adam recommended that you know we try and do some free dives, which I'm not a very good free diver. He's at this point quite a bit better than me, but we did a couple drops around 20 and 30 feet and it was super cool to see like all the fish. We saw actually some soup and sharks free diving. I think they came in close because they're like less afraid of free divers than scuba divers. A lot of bubbles, a lot of noise when you're scuba diving. I actually saw a seal too while we were free diving. Of course, we didn't get any of this on camera, but it was really awesome and it was the perfect holdover between our day dives and our final night dive of the day. And of course the night dive, which was actually quite a bit more challenging than I expected. It's been two years since I've done a night dive. We saw a lot of cool stuff, horn sharks, a lot of predatory kelp bass. The night dive was cool because it just reminded me that there's always something new to learn when you're scuba diving, some new skill to pick up. So that was awesome to always realize that you have more to learn. It's been really awesome kind of rounding out this year on a high note. So I really enjoyed it and hopefully more trips like this will be kind of done in the future. So yeah, thanks.