On Saturday I visited my 12 California Mission which is actually the closest to where I live. The Santa Clara Mission is a very nice place. The Santa Clara University campus is one of the most beautiful campuses that I’ve seen.

There isn’t much left of the original mission at this location. A single adobe wall exists along side the church. The church itself burned to the ground in 1926. The rebuilt church is beautiful inside with a marvelous ceiling and altar area.

If you want to see artifacts, visit the art museum where various mission and university items are located.

Santa Clara is California’s oldest-operating institution of higher education, with more than 150 years of history.

My collection of images from the Portland Art Museum in December

Sunday, January 16th, 2011, was my first dive day of the new year and it was a great day.  Driving down there in the morning, it was very foggy but on the ocean the waves were moderate and conditions good.  By the end of the day the fog had cleared and it was a beautiful sunshine day.

The first dive was Pescadero Point — we entered the water with a slight swell.  I realized on this dive that if I don’t attach my dive computer it hangs lower than 3 feet and starts my dive while I’m on the surface.  If you look at the dive chart below you’ll see I was diving for 5 minutes before I actually went down — that sort of screws with your average dive depth. Saw lots of little crabs that were cool an just liked being in the water again.  Dive time was 48 minutes, 79 ft and the water temp. was 53.  (click on image to see full profile)

 

Pictures from the day can be found on my Facebook page

No diver along the Pacific Coast should be without this book.   Eastern Pacific diving is all about invertebrate life and this book will give you the overview of every major critter that you might see.

All of my dive buddies own this book and every copy you see is use worn or have pages coming out of the binding because so many of us grab it before we dry off to figure out what we saw on the dive.   If you are a diver, you have to have this book.

Click on the link to the left to order you copy today.

Purple stripped jellyfish, Pelagia noctiluca, originally uploaded by Ed Bierman.

The best creature I saw this past year was the purple-striped. I saw this beauty on a dive at Santa Cruz Island in the Fall. I only had seen these once before many years ago in the Big Sur area, I spent a lot of time shooting this one.

Here is some information from Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysaora_colorata

The purple-striped jelly (Chrysaora colorata, formerly Pelagia colorata) is a species of jellyfish exists primarily off the coast of California in Monterey bay. The bell (body) of the jellyfish is up to 70 cm in diameter, typically with a radial pattern of stripes. The tentacles vary with the age of the individual, consisting typically of eight marginal long dark arms, and four central frilly oral arms. It is closely studied by scientists due to not much being known about their eating habits.[1]

Often cancer crabs make home in the jellyfish and eat the parasitic amphipods that feed on and damage the jelly.[2]

Here are my dive stats for 2010 — not as many dives as in the past, will work on getting back into it this coming year.

Photos from my diving day in Monterey in June

Here are my images from the Northern Calfornia Rainbow Divers trip to the Channel Islands.  It was a lot of fun and the LGBT group is one of the best diving clubs in the Bay Area.