Water temp: 58 degrees
Conditions: flat calm, low tide
I finally slipped in a morning of badly needed water time this past week. The Plymouth area has been one of my favorite dive locations the past few years due to the great conditions and different marine life we experience there as compared to diving the south coast area. Dive buddy Eric and I arrived to meet our friend Ted to try a new location in the area. As we carried our gear down to the waters edge we were stoked to see the conditions we had hoped for, I have come to call this place the "Cold Caribbean". Gorgeous panoramic views with the sand bottom next to reef and rocks producing that turquoise color, it's easy to imaging you are looking at a tropical location in front of you. After diving warm cloudy inshore visibility in the Rhode Island area in the summer it is always a great change to slip into some cooler water with 25-30 ft visibility.
As we began to put fins on I noticed an odd wake coming up the shore from our right side about 100 yards offshore. The ocean was like glass with not a ripple anywhere so I pointed it out to my friends and we decided to watch it for a few minutes. A large V shaped wake moving slow and straight, it never deviated from the path it was swimming. There was no dorsal fin extending any height above the water but what ever was swimming just below the surface was very large and produced a significant wake. We decided to hold off and watch it some more time, fearing it possibly be "The GW" we all hoped we would never see there someday. I was hoping it was a big bluefin in shallow for some reason but it swam too straight line and did not act at all like tuna on the surface, it was not a whale as it was only in 25 feet of water and we never saw a back or fluke, or see it dive, or anything else that would lead us to believe it was a small whale. We have all known this area has GW visiting since the seal population has expanded in recent years, but we personally have never had any encounters or sightings.
(what is this dive float / cooler you might ask? stay tuned for new product release)
After we watched it swim off heading north about a 1/4 mile out of site we decided we would just stay in near the reef in shallow and poke around for some lobsters among the rocks then evaluate it some more. After a few minutes in the water I surfaced to find myself amid a school of jumping menhaden being pushed in to me by a group of seals balling them up and pushing them into the shallows. We swam in to standing depth and watched the show of 6-7 large grey seals pushing and aggressively feeding on the fish they had balled up in shallow. Once they had pushed the fish further down the beach about 200 yards we resumed diving.
I managed to pull 4 really nice lobsters very quickly within 1/2 hour. I did see a couple of large females held up deep in their holes i did not bother with assuming they were eggers. Twenty minutes later we surfaced again to find the seals pushing fish into us again. This happened one more time as well and the seals were now swimming in to 20 feet away to check us out and wonder why we were amid their dinner. Finally we decided that the amount of feeding seals, dead oily fish in the water from them, and the rather large critter that swam by earlier was just not the smartest combination of conditions to be in the water with. so we called it and headed in. Diving this area seems to get sketchier every time i try lately. Unfortunate, as it such a pretty area.
Eric and I stopped at one of my little neck spots on the ride home to complete an interesting day. With som lobsters and littlenecks now secured I could now cook a dish my wife and kids have become very fond of... a Pad Thai with New England Shellfish (pic above) , I will post recipe in coming days.
Dive Safe,
Mike
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