Breakwater Cove

This is my first dive without an instructor. My buddy and I were very excited yet anxious. We planned a very simple dive, at the location of our check-out dives, with a very simple mission. We were gonna swim to a spot, go straight down, hunt for seashells, surface, and swim back. We came back to San Carlos beach, entered from the far west end, and head diagonally (NW) out for about 60 yards. That put us at about the spot where I saw 2 rockfish last week. We headed down to about 30'. There are more rocks and vegetation in this part of the ocean. Visibility was about 7-8'. During check-out dives we were scrambling just to keep up with the instructor so we really did not get a chance to enjoy the ocean bottom. This time we pretty much hung out within a 20' radius, so we had chance to take a good look around. I felt I was in an aquarium. We peeked between the rocks and in the nooks, and scouted sea floors. I saw even more rockfish this time, mostly about 14' long. I tried to grab them but they were too fast. Oh I imagined shooting them someday. We hunted for sea shells, but there weren't too many interesting shells, mostly the clam type commonly seen at supermarkets. There were some sea urchin shells which is kind of interesting -- they looked like the ball from an old IBM typewriter. Unfortunately we did not bring a bag and had to hold them in hand, and ended up crushing them. We surfaced at 1000 lbs of air just to be safe. Simple dive but very exciting for us, since we were on our own for the first time. By the way the halibut we saw last week was a 10" baby one, not 10'.