the edge of the abyss

the edge of the abyss, originally uploaded by lemurdillo.

lemurdillo writes:

There's a finger of the monterey submarine canyon that sticks into Carmel Bay, and you can reach it on a shore dive .... but I never had until yesterday.

B & I swam out to the "edge of the finger of kelp" like we did a few months ago, but I had neglected to take into account that the kelp had probably grown a bit since then. I was expecting to drop down into about 50' of water, but when we got to around 60' with no bottom in sight, I realized we were probably a bit too far out...

We swam back to towards end of the kelp bed and hit the empty sand at about 75' deep. To one side, the kelp forest towering above us... to the other, a gentle slope of sand which then suddenly dropped off, maybe 50 feet away from us. "Dude! it's the trench!!!" B signaled that we really ought to go over and take a look over the side. So we did :) We even went about 30' down over the edge, to 110' or so. We had about 60-70' of visibility at this point, and we couldn't see any sort of leveling off. It's a long ways down, folks.

This shot was taken as we approached the edge of the trench, natural light, white-balanced on the sand (which is actually slightly yellower than what this photo shows). An attempt to photograph the unphotographable, really, but hopefully it gives a little bit of an idea of what it looked like...